Something special happens when you hear a record that’s doing so much right that the speakers, or for that matter the entire system disappears and the performance comes to life right before “your eyes.” It is, in my view, the pinnacle of the analog experience, and the pursuit of that experience is essentially what The Broken Record is all about.

In my recent post on Charles Mingus’s fabulous Pre Bird, I posed a question that I regularly find myself asking. Do Better Records’s customers realize just HOW good the records they buy from them ACTUALLY are? How many of them have the system to fully reveal what’s on a Hot Stamper? Because the type of system that gives a Hot Stamper its full due is not your typical audiophile system.

For a good long while now I’ve been able to hear that the records that Better Records sells sound better than your average heavy vinyl reissue. Heck, even when my system didn’t sound half as good as it does now, I could hear how even your average vintage pressing often sounded better than most heavy vinyl reissues. But it took a lot of the right changes and improvements I’ve made over the past couple of years to get my system to play my Hot Stampers well enough to reveal what they’re actually capable doing. That is, sounding more like a live performance than a record.

And make no mistake, sounding like a live performance is the very thing that makes a Hot Stamper, especially a White Hot Stamper, special. Can a record not bought from Better Records do that? Of course it can. You can certainly find your own as I and I’m sure others have. But you need a lot of luck, a lot of time and it will still likely cost you some serious coin. At the end of the day, spending the money it will cost you to buy a record from BR is by far the easiest and most reliable way of getting a record that will continue to reveal itself as your system gets better at playing it.

I remember the first time I “heard” what a Hot Stamper could do. It was a Super Hot copy of Sonny Rollins’s The Bridge, a copy I’d had for a while and I had always liked the sound of. But I had several other jazz records at the time that also sounded great to me. It wasn’t clear to me then what exactly set the Hot Stamper apart. Sure, it had the clean, clear top end, good bass and appealing lack of distortion that I’d come to expect from a Hot Stamper, but as records go, what was it that made it truly special?

Then one day, after I’d made some significant improvements to my system, I played The Bridge Hot Stamper again, and it was as though I was hearing a completely different record. I could hear the SIZE and SOLIDITY of the performances in a far more compelling way than I’d EVER heard on ANY record. I realized then that THIS was the sound of a live performance. THIS SOUND is what the Hot Stamper is ALL ABOUT!

Every improvement I’d made to my system at that point had led to that realization, but a few that spring to mind are the addition of the Ventus Audio grounding box, switching to a vintage Japanese low powered amp and putting both that amp, as well as my turntable, on separate Townshend Seismic Platters. I wasn’t all that surprised by how much the Townshend platter helped the sound under my turntable, but I was near shocked by how much difference it made under the amp. Collectively those three changes contributed substantially to my system being able to reproduce naturalness and subtle “realness” necessary for that “live in the studio” sound.

After playing my copy of Pre Bird a few weeks ago, I got very excited. Mingus’s bass was SO BIG and SO PRESENT, and each of the horns were SO easily discerned and delightfully FREE of artifice. I felt sure I’d landed a stone cold killer on the very first try. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a thrill when it does.

So when BR agreed to loan me the White Hot copy they had for sale, I must admit, I was a little concerned that it wouldn’t beat my copy. Was I wasting their precious time having them send it to me? Would I need to doctor up my article to say how great it was (which I had no doubt it would be) while withholding the fact that it wasn’t any better than my copy?

Suffice it to say, my concerns were misplaced. The WHS of Pre Bird is, in short, near perfection in a jazz record. And what makes it so, outside of the fact that the music is nothing less than astonishing, is that it is SO TRANSPARENT with resolution SO COMPLETE from top to bottom that I can literally SEE into every last inch of the recording studio, hear every instrument in it AND the space around those instruments.

The instruments closer to the front of the studio are very well presented on my copy, but it wasn’t until I heard the WHS that I could hear that, on my copy, the instruments at the back of the studio, while easy to make out and appreciate, lacked definition and focus. On the WHS, I can hear every instrument at the back of the studio space (a BIG space!) just as fully and clearly as those at the front. In fact, now that this copy was letting me hear things I hadn’t really heard before, I took the opportunity to reposition my Shakti Hallographs so I could make the space I was able to reproduce in my listening room even bigger.

There’s a moment, about halfway through the magical final track, “Half-Mast Inhibition,” when a trumpet comes in, playing at the back left of the studio. It is an unforgettable moment, both musically and sonically. On the WHS that trumpet sings out so clearly, so mournfully, it’s almost spooky. It’s a moment that, once you hear it, you’ll never forget it.

Hearing a performance this way is an experience that’s left a lasting impression on me. The WHS of Pre Bird has reset my expectations for what is possible on a jazz record, and for better or worse, it has raised the bar for what I’ll want to hear on every record going forward.

I’ve ordered another copy of Pre Bird from a seller in Japan. If this one can approach the stratospheric heights that the WHS can, I’ll consider the hundred or so bucks I’ve invested in this title for the now two copies I’ll own, a tremendous bargain. But what if it doesn’t sound that good? In fact, what if it’s not even as good as the copy I already have? What then? How many copies do I want to buy and clean and play to find one that rivals the one that, for a few more days, is sitting just a few short feet away from my turntable?

Acquiring a good sounding copy of Pre Bird is not hard. Finding one that can give this terrific album its full due is a lot tougher. Take it from someone who’s not only heard the record, but heard it on a system built to reveal its strengths. If you’ve built a system like that, or you plan to down the road, buy this WHS of Pre Bird. You will be getting MORE than your money’s worth!