Begging the BIG Questions in Analog Audio: A Conversation w/ Tom Port of Better Records

Several years ago, after a rather long stretch with the same gear, I started to upgrade my audio system. With my limited spending budget a factor, I decided to stay focused on analog and vinyl.

Around the same time I learned about Discogs and how I could now go WAY beyond just searching for a particular record title and sift through what in some cases seemed countless different pressings of that title for a specific one. But which one? As an audiophile beginning to realize that some of these pressings sounded better than others, I immediately began researching which pressings of certain records those might be.

That was when I saw and article in Wired Magazine about Tom Port and Better Records and was introduced to the concept of the hot stamper for the very first time. I was just BEGINNING to learn which pressings of a few titles might sound better than others, and NOW I had to consider the variability in sound quality WITHIN each pressing? My brain nearly burst!

Nevertheless, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about hot stampers and what I could do to find them. At that point I wasn’t quite ready to pony up the big numbers required to shop at Better Records, but I soon realized that finding my own hot stampers wasn’t going to be easy. So one evening I had a conversation with my wife during which I talked through how I could justify spending 100 bucks on a copy of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and before too long I was the proud owner of my very first Hot Stamper.

I’ve bought quite a few more of them since then, and have found some very good sounding copies of quite a few titles myself. Meanwhile during that time I’ve written pretty extensively about my experiences with Hot Stampers. You’ll find many such articles on this site. I’ve also taken a pretty deep dive into Tom’s blog onthrecord.co where I’ve found LOADS of helpful tips on the subject of finding, cleaning and playing great sounding records.

Recently I reached out to Tom to see if he’d allow me to interview him. Fortunately he agreed and allowed me to unload some of the many questions I have for him.

TBR: Tom, thanks so much for doing this! I really appreciate the opportunity to learn more about you and your business! As I understand it, you started selling records oriented toward audiophiles well before the birth of the “hot stamper.” When did you first start Better Records? Can you tell me a little about your business model and what kinds of records you were selling early on?

TP: Happy to tell my story. As we like to say, the process we pioneered can be implemented by anyone who wants to improve the quality of his vinyl collection, achieve better playback and hone his critical listening skills, all at the same time. It’s not easy but it is very doable.

I started in 1987, and still have my original typed, photocopied catalog that you had to call me in order to have me mail it out to you. No mailing list. There were just a couple of pages of direct to discs, half-speeds, a few Japanese pressings and other records with some kind of audiophile appeal. Very embarrassing stuff, and the kinds of records that foolish audiophiles like me thought had better sound than the regular records found in stores.

I cringe when I look back on that list. I cringe when I look at my catalog from 2000 too. I thought I knew what I was doing but it was a clear case of me not knowing how little I knew and how much I needed to learn.

This goes for audio equipment too. I had to learn a lot and it took me decades to do it.

TBR: Still, it must have been a fairly novel idea in 1987 to market records specifically to audiophiles. Was that, in fact, a fairly new idea at the time?

TP: Acoustic Sounds was doing it before me by a few years. I used his catalog pricing to figure out what to buy and how much to charge for it. There was an audio newsletter that you could subscribe to back then for about ten bucks a year, mostly devoted to buying and selling audiophile equipment. Some ads were for records though.

The first four records I bought were four copies of For Duke from my local stereo store that was getting rid of all its audiophile vinyl now that the CDs had come along. They may have been in white jackets even, cost me five bucks each.  I took out an ad. Sold them for $45-50 and thought “this is easy money!”  I soon learned that most audiophile records — Crystal Clear direct to discs come to mind –were not worth much to anybody, and for good reason they’re not very good records.

TBR: Here we are well over 20 years since then and half-speed mastered records and other “embarrassing stuff,” as you put it, are still dominating the audiophile record market. Why do you think that is?

TP:  I wrote about that on my blog. Here’s an excerpt:

From our point of view, today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making thirty years ago. The Audiophile Heavy Vinyl Remaster, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each burdened with an equally dismal track record?

And isn’t it every bit as true today as it was in the past that the audiophiles who buy these “special” pressings rarely seem to notice that many of them don’t actually sound any good?

Pardon my pessimism, but it seems to me the learning curve these days is looking awfully flat. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of learning going on. If such learning were actually going on, how would most of these audiophile labels still be in business?

Don’t get me wrong: some progress has been made. Reference, Chesky and Audioquest thankfully no longer burden us with their awful LPs. But is the new Blue or Yes Album really any better than the average MoFi from 1979? Different yes, but better? I know one thing: I couldn’t sit through an entire side of either of them. And I love that music.

Compared to the real thing, or, as we like to call them, Hot Stampers, can any of these records really compete sonically? A few, I guess, but too few, and they are pretty darn far between.

Turns out there are no easy answers. There are no quick fixes. In audio there’s only hard work and more hard work. That’s what gives the learning curve its curvature — the more you do it, the better you can do it.

And if doing all that work is also your idea of fun, you just might get really good at it. (See our link below about how to become an expert listener.) If you actually enjoy playing fifteen copies of One Man Dog to find the few that really sound good — because hearing such wonderful music the way it was meant to be heard is a positive thrill — then you just might end up with one helluva great record collection, worlds better than one filled with audiophile pressings from any era, most especially the present.

Becoming an expert listener

TP: A lot of what we do on the blog is try to educate the audiophile public in the areas of critical listening skills, turntable set-up, tweaks, cleaning and anything else we can think of.

If you have never bought a Hot Stamper pressing from me, you probably don’t know how second- and third-rate all these new records are. We have hundreds of testimonials to that effect, basically “I never knew records could sound like this!” letters. Get them all the time. But our prices are such that you have to be fairly serious about this hobby, and it seems that not many audiophiles are all that serious.

To get good sound you need money, time, energy, a good room and tremendous dedication and drive. You have to be unstoppable. In my experience that’s one or two per cent of the people who self-identify as audiophiles. Most audiophiles have the quality of playback that comes from NOT doing it the way it needs to be done to be successful at the highest levels. Knowing that you don’t know is the key to learning.

Nothing against people having crap stereos, but please don’t think you know things you can’t possibly know. We talk about it on the site here:

CONFIRMATION BIAS – WHY YOU WON’T HEAR WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR

Fortunately I’ve been successful in audio, but lately I have come to doubt that many can, even if they try hard and spend lots of money. Very, very small differences in sound have to be very, very important to you if you are going to be any good at this tweaky stereo game. You have to be obsessed with tiny improvements. What part of the population is obsessed in this way? My guess is a few per cent. I know of exactly one fellow who is like me in that regard. He was a good friend to me in San Diego and taught me a lot.  I took his experimental attitude about audio and taught myself what I know today.

TBR: You’re fortunate to have had a competent mentor. I have a friend who owns a store in SF who, for a lot of years, he helped me muddle through the lower end of high end audio pretty well. But as I started to reach higher I could see he wasn’t capable of guiding me any further. His approach is too conventional for me.

I imagine your friend in San Diego was less conventional in his approach to audio. What were some things that he taught you that helped you along your way?

TP: So many things, but I will mention the most important one. George, my friend in San Diego, went to the trouble of unplugging his refrigerator while listening to music. He had a special light rigged up that told him the fridge was off so that he would not forget to plug it back in, which, as you can imagine, happened a few times, hence the need for the light.

He generously used to help me work on my system. He came over one day. We had a female vocal record we knew well, played it a few times, and then he said we should unplug my fridge and see what happens to the sound. I reached behind my fridge and pulled a plug. Big improvement in the sound, the vocalist was now more present, more breathy and more real than just a few moments ago. What a shock, such a difference! For free too.

So we plugged it back in to see if the improvement went away. Sure enough it did. Back and forth a few times, no question, a big improvement in the sound. On other records too. Case closed.

Then something happened, how I do not remember exactly. I had the fridge unplugged, but when I opened the door, the light went on. What? I looked behind the fridge. Two plugs, one for the microwave, one for the fridge. I had been unplugging the microwave all this time! A microwave that was not on and should have had nothing to do with the sound.

But that was not the case. George goes home, unplugs his microwave, calls me on the phone and says “you must come over and hear my stereo, it’s the best it had ever sounded!”

I go over there, I hear it, he is right, it does sound better than ever. We play records we have played dozens of times — Three Blind Mice records with Yamamoto were our favorites, Time Out, Magical Mystery Tour, The Wall, Sheffield Direct Discs — and all of them were better in every way. Plugging the microwave back in was a drag. Back and forth we went. The difference was very clear and you didn’t need to be told whether it was plugged in or not, it was easy to tell by the sound.

Since that time I have always made sure everything that makes the sound worse gets unplugged when listening critically to the stereo (which is what we do all day, every day).

I wrote about it here:

THE BRAHMS VIOLIN CONCERTO – UNPLUG OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!

Everything is tested, most often with the listener not knowing what is being changed, and then the experiment is repeated multiple times. Some things when plugged in make the stereo sound better. Again, tested many times, and the differences must be obvious and repeatable for them to be part of our listening protocol. No cooking, no air conditioning, no nothing is allowed to go on while the music is playing. This drives my wife crazy but it makes the differences between pressings much more obvious. In other words it pays the bills. At five o’clock when the shootouts are done, everything gets plugged back in and turned on.

I owe this discovery to my friend George. I should also point out that none of my audiophile friends can be bothered to unplug anything in their houses. This is why I cannot listen to any stereos other than mine. All the stuff that I “fixed” in my system still needs “fixing” in theirs. How could I possibly put up with that kind of mediocrity? But if all you know is mediocrity, you don’t know what you are missing and you don’t bother to go looking for it.

Not to keep beating a horse that in my world officially died in 2007 with the release of the Heavy Vinyl pressing of Blue, all of this goes a long way toward explaining the attraction of Heavy Vinyl, a subject we have discussed endlessly on the site and the blog. And we have hundreds of testimonials from customers to the same effect. People — some people anyway, not everybody — freak out when they hear how much better our records sound than the ones they were told were the best. They freak out and they write us very enthusiastic letters. There are more than 250 on the blog. If we published them all there could easily be 500.

Like the allegorical shadow figures in Plato’s cave, the audiophile is fooled into thinking his modern record is a reasonable approximation of the sound of the master tape, when it fact it is a mediocre facsimile of a much more intense and powerful reality. But this reality cannot simply be asserted into being. It must be experienced. Until you hear the difference between our Hot Stamper pressings and whatever pressing it is you own, on your stereo, in your listening room, you will never know what you are missing. You will be chasing shadows and not even know it.

Many of the audiophiles who converted to digital know a thing or two about going down the wrong road and not noticing how wrong it was until they had gone a very long way. Same difference.

TBR: When did you first start selling “Hot Stampers”? How were they received by the public then?

TP: I had good customers in the ’90s who were looking for especially good sounding pressings. I remember some titles very well: Sergio Mendes, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Deja Vu, Someday My Prince Will Come, Led Zeppelin I. I sold them for a few hundred dollars each. My friend Robert Pincus coined the term, taught me that some sides sound right and some wrong on the same pressing, that sort of thing.

2004 seems to be the year that Hot Stampers went up on the website. I had four killer copies of Teaser and the Firecat, some UK, some domestic. I put one up for $500. I wrote that “if this record doesn’t sell, I’ll keep it for myself because it’s the best copy I have ever heard and I love this album.” Not only did that copy sell, so did the other three!

It sounds easy but back then it was very difficult to do shootouts. I tried to do one for Houses of the Holy. I had about twenty nice copies, used the Disc Doctor fluid to clean them all, sat down with the stereo I had a the time, and I spent days trying to figure out which was the best one. Could not do it, gave up. Some did this, some did that, no copy did everything.

Nowadays doing a shootout like that is like falling off a log. Better cleaning, better playback, better critical listening skills, better protocols, better everything in every way. Takes maybe 90 minutes to shootout 10 copies on both sides. The winner is clearly the best. Those kinds of records never get returned for sound. They sound so good you can tell from another room how good they are. (We like to say the average audiophile pressing sounds so wrong you can hear how bad it is from another room, and that’s truer today than ever.)

TBR: You mentioned equipment and how it took you decades to learn what you’ve learned about it. Would you say the steepness of the learning curve to really appreciate what a “Hot Stamper” is really all about puts your records, in a certain sense, out of reach for most audiophiles? I don’t mean out of reach monetarily, but more from a full sonic appreciation standpoint.

TP: Well, there’s a lot there to discuss. I would say that our sales tell us that most audiophiles can hear the benefit of our Hot Stampers because it’s rare for someone to buy a top copy and send it back for a refund. It almost never happens.

There are some audiophiles who buy our cheaper records and return them, saying their copies are as good, better, close enough or something along those lines. We think that if we had their copy of the record and played it against our copy on our system we would not find that to be true. But we never argue these points because we cannot really know what our records sound like on their system, what they listened for, and all the rest. And if they expected Cosmo’s Factory to sound like Dark Side of the Moon, there is not much we can do for them.

For our good customers, occasionally they have a record they think sounds good, as good as the one we sent them, and I will sometimes let them send their pressing to me to evaluate. It gives me a chance to point out what their pressing is doing wrong and what ours is doing right, and usually that settles the matter. I don’t remember when was the last time we lost one of those shootouts. Many, many years. Ten maybe.

Here is a customer who figured it out for himself, and has since become a loyal Hot Stamper fan:

LETTER OF THE WEEK – FLEETWOOD MAC – HOW WE GO ABOUT OUR SHOOTOUTS AND LOTS MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

There are 4500+ entries on the blog talking about every record and every audio issue under the sun, and anyone who want to learn more can do so for free.

TBR: Well, not to gloat but you actually lost one of those shootouts fairly recently with a copy of Bizet’s The Carmen Ballet I sent you. You may have forgotten because you didn’t like the copy of Kind of Blue I also sent along and that I wrote about here not too long ago. I believe your words about my Carmen Ballet record were “your Bizet kills mine.”

TP: Oh shit! You are so right – selective memory! Your copy did kill mine.

TBR: That not withstanding, I hear what you saying. I’ve read some forum threads about Better Records where posters have said they bought a record from you and theirs sounded better and they sent it back.

TP: I was planning on pointing out a few errors these writers have made in thinking about records, just for educational purposes, but I still joke that I wear the abuse as a badge of honor!

TBR: This raises a question for me that keeps coming up. Can we really objectively say one record has better sound than another? Some of your critics might argue that what YOU say is a record with better sound, say one of the records you sell, than say, a MoFi of the same title, just as an example, is really just you saying YOU PREFER the sound of a vintage pressing to the sound of the MoFi and that everyone else should see it that way too. What do you say to those who say that their view that MoFi’s or Analogue Productions’ records sound great and the notion that a Hot Stamper sounds better is just a matter of personal preference?

TP: Let me preface my remarks with the discussion of a pet peeve of mine, the misuse of the phrase “begging the question.” Begging the question does not mean “leaving the question, any question, unanswered” and it does not mean “avoiding the question that needs to be answered.” It means assuming the very thing that must be proven for the question to be answered.

A good example I like to use is this: Why are you a Christian? Answer: Because the bible is the word of God. Now, the bible may be the word of God, but isn’t that something that we would need to provide some evidence for in order to believe in the truth of Christianity? You would need to make the case as to why the bible is the word of God before we go any further down this road. If you can make that case, then believing in Christianity would make perfect sense. But you cannot convince anyone of the rightness of the proposition simply by asserting it without evidence. 

This is at the heart of many of the major disagreements in audio going strong to this day. See if any of these look familiar:

*Tubes versus transistors.

*Digital vs. Analog.

*Old pressings versus new pressings.

*Half-speed mastering versus real-time mastering.

*Horns versus screens versus dynamic drivers versus electrostatics versus who knows what somebody will dream up to convert an electrical signal into moving air.

And here’s the one audiophiles have the most trouble with: 

*Original versus reissue.

Almost all claims to superiority in audio are nothing more than evidence-free, unproven assertions.  These claims again and again simply beg a question they should be trying to answer.

Why are these questions so hard to answer? Because there is no answer. There can never be an answer. Case in point: I am an ALL transistor guy now. I used to be an all tube guy. Which approach is better? How can I possibly prove to you my contention that transistors do a better job of reproducing music than tubes?

In trying to make my case, the first problem that crops up immediately is which transistors and which tubes? I like very little of the equipment I have heard in the last twenty or so years. A very few pieces of transistor gear sound great to me, and I own those. But I don’t like practically any other transistor equipment I can remember hearing.

Can you judge my transistor equipment without hearing it? Of course not. I cannot judge your equipment, tube or transistor, for precisely the same reason – I never heard it.

When someone says half-speed mastering is superior because it gives the cutter head twice as much time to cut the groove, and therefore the cutter head is able to do a better job, that is an assertion that needs evidence to support it. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. What is the evidence to support this claim?

So all the discussions and arguments boil down to unproven assertions. Begged questions.

Now we come along and say to the audiophile public – we can prove our records sound better than other records you may own or have heard of the same music. The public of course has a right to be skeptical. Why would it be that our records sound better? So we explain that no two records sound the same — an unproven assertion if there ever was one — and that we clean and play lots of copies of the same record to find the best sounding one.

All very intriguing, but convincing? Just go the forums to see how unconvinced most audiophiles are. And they can never be convinced without playing one of our records, which most have no intention of ever doing, almost as a matter of principle.

We try to make our case on our site and our blog (4500 posts and counting!), explaining to potential buyers what we listened for, what the best copies are doing on which songs, what the average copy we play gets wrong, what to listen for when testing our copy against yours, and on and on. On the blog there are about a hundred records with track by track breakdowns to guide a potential buyer in evaluating what our copy is doing well, maybe even amazingly well, that his copy is very likely not doing as well.

And we let the customer decide how convincing our evidence is by sending him or her the record and letting them play it on their system, in their room. Once the record starts playing, nothing we wrote has any bearing on the sound s/he hears. It either sounds better to them or it doesn’t. Who cares what WE said it sounds like? S/he is the only arbiter of the sound quality once the record is in their hands, and that’s how it should be. As Richard Feynman famously said, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

Some context: It’s extremely rare that someone tells us they prefer their Heavy Vinyl pressing to ours. It’s happened a few times but so few I cannot remember when it happened last. It’s much more common for someone to say I like my copy just as much as the one you sent me, or almost as much, such that I cannot justify spending the money on yours. This accounts for the bulk of our returns, which are averaging two or three per cent of our total sales these days.

Part of that percentage is returns for noisier surfaces than the customer finds acceptable. We have been playing old records for a very long time and surface noise is less of an issue for us than it is for some of our customers. (We also have a quiet cartridge and a very dialed-in front end, both of which reduce surface noise.)

As returns go, there is one very important thing to keep in mind: we don’t know it all. We learn new things every day. If you go to my blog and read about Nirvana Nevermind you will see a We Was Wrong commentary that makes the case that we live and learn about records all the time. There are a great many others. Who else writes about being wrong about anything in audio, ever?

Furthermore, this example may be of interest. There is a famous Classic Rock band whose records we used to sell exclusively on British or domestic pressing. They always sounded the best to us. A customer returned a copy of one of our Hot Stampers and said his German pressing was better sounding. We thought that was interesting. We had heard some German LPs but nothing that knocked us out. Perhaps we just hadn’t heard the right ones.

This customer’s opinion as to the superiority of his German pressing was judged by us to be unlikely but certainly not impossible. The customer in question had a good ear, so we went about getting hold of a big batch of German pressings. We learned a valuable albeit expensive lesson: some were terrible, but some were the best sounding pressings we had ever heard, and that was true of more than one title, an additional surprise.

What a shocker! We had heard the wrong German pressings before, and judged all German pressings based on the mediocre copies we’d played. But there is a lot of money to be made if better pressings could be found, and rather than remaining ignorant, or letting our pride and ego get the better of us, we decided to invest a significant amount of time and money and roll the dice. Fortunately for us and our customers we came up with some simply amazing sounding pressings. 

Who else is in a position to do such a thing? No one to my knowledge, certainly not to the tune of the many hundreds of dollars we spent with no guarantee of success.

Getting back to returns, one of the great comforts of our rather specialized business is the knowledge that when a record comes back to us for any reason other than a surface issue we might have missed, once it has been relisted and sells to another buyer we never see it again.  There have been a few times when the same record came back to us more than once, but only for condition issues we failed to note. I cannot ever recall  a record that came back for unacceptable sound that did not go to a new home and stay there permanently.

Some people can play our records properly and some people can’t. We don’t have any way of knowing what any given customer is listening for, what he likes and doesn’t like. Fortunately our business model allows us to ignore the things we cannot know, which include everything about the playback of our records in our customers’ homes.

Playing a record well is the hardest thing to do in all of audio. For fifty years, starting as a serious enthusiast in the early ’70s, I have spent a great deal of time and money trying to better my record playback. I am still making improvements to the system and room, and just made some important ones this week in building out a new studio in a new location and moving the stereo into it. I learned a lot in the process. Rigorously controlled shootouts by carefully trained listeners will continue for as long as there are customers who appreciate the difference our records make in the enjoyment of their favorite music.

But we can’t PROVE our records are better than anyone else’s. We’re convinced they are, it’s obvious to us they are, but that judgment rests entirely in the hands of our customers. Arguing the point ultimately boils down to nothing more than begging the question. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and our customers really like the way our pudding tastes these days.  The letters section of the blog has hundreds of their reviews, and business is booming.

We believe we provide a very high quality product at a fair price, and if for any reason anyone disagrees with that assessment, they get their money back. We like satisfied customers, and we bend over backwards to make sure our customers get the highest quality service we can possibly offer.  We treat our customers that way because that’s the way we would want to be treated. That’s a rather obvious callback to the bible from earlier in our discussion, and whether the bible is the word of god or not, there is surely great wisdom to be found there, including something about “doing unto others…”

TBR: Thank you Tom! It’s been a genuine pleasure. Keep up the fabulous work!