No Better Records is not hype. I've got a White Hot Stamper of Fleetwood Mac. People can whine, argue, whatever about the cost being worth it. What they cannot do is find anything better. The best of what they have is so much better than ANYTHING else I have EVER heard it is not even close. Honestly, I would never in my life have thought anything on vinyl, tape, or otherwise could even be that good. Granted I have never heard a studio master tape. Certainly nothing pressed can ever be any better than that. Whatever. Like I said, bring on the whiners and deniers, its just inexplicably unbelievably awesomely good sound.
That said, the next big takeaway from this is they are right, no two records sound the same. Once I compared my run of the mill Fleetwood Mac to the otherworldly good WHS I started doing shootouts with some of the other dupes in my collection. The results so far are there are indeed no two copies yet that I have compared that sounded the same. ALWAYS there is one that sounds better. Not a little better. Not like you have to strain to hear. I'm talking like its darn obvious and right away. So obvious in fact that one time I even knew the copy I was playing was a dud and I hadn't even heard the other copy in over a week!
The dud by the way was a BRAND NEW Analogue Productions copy of Linda Ronstadt's What's New. A fabulous George Massenburg recording mastered by the legendary Doug Sax at the Mastering Lab.... RUINED by Analogue Productions! I mean I could only stand a few minutes then yanked it off and replaced it with my worn out old used record copy which sounds a whole lot better. Strings have just the right amount of bite, Linda's voice is THERE with enveloping acoustic, on and on. Much better.
Every shootout I have done, if you can find a decent sounding (not even especially good, just decent) original old pressing I can just about guarantee it will absolutely kill any heavy vinyl audiophile reissue no matter how much they overcharged you for it.
