More on the Subject of Pretentious Knowledge
In our twenty-year-old review for the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan we made the following claim, a claim which we obviously had no evidence to back up.
But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.
It was foolish of us to declare any such thing, especially with such certainty. How on earth could we possibly know what tapes were used to master the record, in Germany of all places? The very idea is absurd. We call people out for saying things they have no evidence to support all the time. Running into this review today, I have to call myself out for such nonsense. What I should have said was the following:
This reissue sounds to us as though it has been made from copy tapes.
Just to be clear, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that it sounds like a copy tape was used to master the record, but I am not at all justified in saying that a copy tape was actually used to master the record.
Nor do I have any business talking about about the sound of a master tape I’ve never heard.
I can certainly talk about the sound of the best London pressings. Those I have played. I’ve critically listened to batches of them over the course of many years. They may be expensve but they are not hard to find. We’ve sold dozens of them as Hot Stamper pressings and played plenty of others with sound not good enough or surfaces not quiet enough to offer to our customers.
Whatever approach Decca may have used in the mastering, with whatever tape they may have used to make the records that we’ve auditioned, is information that would be nice to have. But it’s really none of my business, since it doesn’t alter the sound of the pressings we auditioned.
More importantly, it’s none of Better Records’ business.
Our business is about one thing and one thing only: records that sound better than other pressings.
Discussions of master tapes and what they should sound like or what they do sound like is not part of our remit. Nor should it be. At bottom it is nothing but speculation, and it is rarely if ever supported by anything resembling evidence.
We are firmly on record as opposing that sort of thing.
We’ve Been Saying This for Twenty Years
After our dubious claim to knowing that the record was mastered from a copy tape, we went on to say: