Acetates etc: The In Groove vs. Analogue Planet. Fight!

[myles]

$575. For a White Stripes album.
And he is not being nit-picky.

Watching now and feeling anxious for him because he has had more than one opportunity to drop it so far. He's flashing that craft knife round like Zorro too!
You don't get much for your money these days!

 

[Weekender]

You can certainly pay a heck of a lot more than $575 for a White Stripes record!

I did not know that.

 

[Tony L]

I did not know that.

One of the most collectable bands out there! Check out PopSike! Just so many really limited pressings and a huge fan base that is now at the ‘wealthy’ stage of their lives. Jack White certainly plays to it with endless interesting and often beautiful new ways of marketing stuff.

 

[Weekender]

Blimey.

 

[Weekender]

Just wondering if Mikey F has seen it yet?
He would be advised to keep his head down IMO.

 

[irons1965]

Oh noes! Mike has another ERC title! Incomprehensibly a copy of White Blood Cells, why that got the $575 treatment I have no idea.

PS The sharpie thing is an utter disgrace. He’s absolutely right to go apeshit on that one.

I watched this last night, could not believe what I was seeing.
Sharpie pen on the spines was beyond belief - I'd love to hear what ERC say about it.....

 

[Tony L]

Mike reviews the $500 ERC mono Doors 1st album! Mike always makes me laugh, he just calls it as he sees it.

Really interesting to compare with Michael 45rpm on this title. A totally different viewpoint.

FWIW my suspicion is ‘In Groove’ Mike just has way better knowledge and experience of this record. He has immaculate copies of every major pressing and as a real Doors fan/dealer will have heard many, many more than the 12 or so he showed on camera. His view also aligns with the comments from Steve Hoffman on his forum (which I’d already read) who knows the Doors masters well and reckons the mono cutting master was always awful with distortion baked in from the off, and judging on what Mike says it’s fallen apart since. I like Michael 45 a lot, he’s a really good bloke, but he’s a comparative newbie to this, I think he’s only been into vinyl for a decade or so and only recently is he starting to seriously explore original pressings, starting to read matrixes etc. I’d love to see his response to some of Mike’s better copies.

PS I’ve got the Hoffman DCC stereo vinyl and the Perception CD box which has high-res digital so I’m done!

 

[Tony L]

Here’s the Hoffman forum thread. Steve’s comments seem right on the money as one would expect and someone has posted a sample of the ERC which just from my non-audiophile iPad certainly has some obvious crunch/distortion to it. That said I’ve never owned a mono copy of this, I went from a ‘70s UK Elektra reissue stereo to the Hoffman DCC stereo. Hoffman states the mono master just is distorted so one can argue ERC is just reflecting reality. I didn’t notice any dropouts or anything on the clip of Break On Through, though I wasn’t 100% convinced by the pitch (that could be replay chain though). I’ve dug the DCC out for a play…

 

[Darmok]

I have seen many acetates' rummaging through many boxes of records at boot sales and tother places.

A lot of them were obscure titles to me and lots of them had white corrosion reaction, caused by moisture attacking the aluminium bases / formers.

Goodness knows what I may of passed over or missed out on a treasure.

Another +1 for the Steve Hoffman forum.

 

[paulfromcamden]

I have seen many acetates' rummaging through many boxes of records at boot sales and tother places.

A lot of them were obscure titles to me and lots of them had white corrosion reaction, caused by moisture attacking the aluminium bases / formers.

Goodness knows what I may of passed over or missed out on a treasure.

Funnily enough I bought some acetates today just out of curiosity. A 12" Death In Vegas remix with a Tape To Tape Mastering label and a couple of Music House 10" acetates. One double-sided with a couple of Marshall Jefferson tracks and another with some kind of unidentified early 90s commercial house.

The Death In Vegas has the record label name on the label so I'm guessing was an official promo (though I can't find it listed anywhere). I'm guessing the 10"s were pressed by/for DJs as I used to live near Holloway years ago and there would always be a queue on Fridays of people getting their dubplates cut at Music House to play out that night.

 

[narabdela]

Mike reviews the $500 ERC mono Doors 1st album! Mike always makes me laugh, he just calls it as he sees it.

"It is absolutely disgustingly shitty!"

He does doesn't he.

 

[myles]

"It is absolutely disgustingly shitty!"

He does doesn't he.

Hilarious. I've just watched the video and I initially thought 'this could be impartial', then he saw the bubbling on the tip on sleeve. 'Hmmmm, here we go', then he went on to praise the cover....'ok'.....

Then it all went off......I think he has a 'thing' for ERC but you can't deny that Hoffman identified the fatal flaw with this LP so his rant wasn't unexpected.

 

[paulfromcamden]

Mike reviews the $500 ERC mono Doors 1st album! Mike always makes me laugh, he just calls it as he sees it.

Interesting that Mike says you can hear tape wow on the ERC release that was fixed digitally in the VMP master.

If you have a crappy tape seems obvious to me to do proper digital restoration. But I guess that's a no-no to the audiophiles happy to pay £350 for an 'all analog' pressing. It's stupid and marketing-led.

 

[myles]

Interesting that Mike says you can hear tape wow on the ERC release that was fixed digitally in the VMP master.

If you have a crappy tape seems obvious to me to do proper digital restoration. But I guess that's a no-no to the audiophiles happy to pay £350 for an 'all analog' pressing. It's stupid and marketing-led.

They can hear a digital step being waved within fifty feet of a AAA recording don't you know. Golden ears.

 

[Tony L]

Interesting that Mike says you can hear tape wow on the ERC release that was fixed digitally in the VMP master.

If you have a crappy tape seems obvious to me to do proper digital restoration. But I guess that's a no-no to the audiophiles happy to pay £350 for an 'all analog' pressing. It's stupid and marketing-led.

There’s tape wow that I can hear via the short excerpt on the Steve Hoffman forum, Alabama Song certainly sounds out of tune to me, but more interesting Mike and his wife Angel describe high frequency dropouts and a screeching noise. Michael Fremer has got a review up on his site denying everything and saying it sounds great. So what’s the big difference here? For a start Mike and Angel are around half Fremer’s age! I have a feeling the like/hate on this one will break down to a) how good your sense of pitch, and b) how good your ears are over say 8kHz.

Here’s a live stream from a few days ago, sadly the sound is poor, and it is very long, but it is interesting to hear Angel’s perspective. She’s a non-audiophile but couldn’t stay in the room with the ERC. I’d love to see a spectrograph as my bet is it has a treble-spike above the hearing of the boomers buying it. I couldn’t hear it myself on Alabama Song, only that it is obviously out of tune, but I was only listening on iPad speakers and I’m a 59 year old ex-indie muso so whilst my ears are better than most of my peers (I wore plugs) they are still no good over about 10-12kHz or so. I may well not be able to hear what is driving Mike and Angel nuts, and I bet Fremer can’t!

 

[Tony L]

I’ll chuck this here as it almost fits. Fremer, Kessler, Michael 45 and ‘Stunty’ discussing reviewing. I’m only about 20 minutes and it is all a bit ‘boomer cringe’ to put it mildly; old men discussing old music seemingly oblivious to a whole exciting world of new music that has exploded on other platforms and sales mediums. There is a self-importance to both Kessler and Fremer that I find really off putting. Elderly woefully out-of-touch white men criticising a ‘new’ they haven’t even bothered to locate. I guess we are all guilty of it to a degree, but I at least recognise it and certainly buy more current music than reissues. So much amazing genre-melting stuff around at present, yet these people seem stuck in a ‘major label/dad-rock’ mindset. I’m pretty sure Michael 45 is younger than me, he has no excuse at all!

 

[Graham H]

Fremer, Kessler, Michael 45 and ‘Stunty’ discussing reviewing. I’m only about 20 minutes and it is all a bit ‘boomer cringe’ to put it mildly; old men discussing old music seemingly oblivious to a whole exciting world of new music that has exploded on other platforms and sales mediums. There is a self-importance to both Kessler and Fremer that I find really off putting. Elderly woefully out-of-touch white men criticising a ‘new’ they haven’t even bothered to locate. I guess we are all guilty of it to a degree, but I at least recognise it and certainly buy more current music than reissues. So much amazing genre-melting stuff around at present, yet these people seem stuck in a ‘major label/dad-rock’ mindset. I’m pretty sure Michael 45 is younger than me, he has no excuse at all!

I think you have just succinctly described why I don’t bother watching or listening to these people. There are more informed sources of info around, usually from musicians talking about their own craft. IME audiophile lead musical opinion rarely leads very far.

 

[Tony L]

IME audiophile lead musical opinion rarely leads very far.

I think it has its place, I’ve certainly found the Steve Hoffman forum very useful from a pressing/mastering perspective. My only interest in the reissue market is for jazz albums that were far before my time and are just too hard to find in the UK in clean original form. I don’t have a single audiophile jazz reissue I’d not swap for a mint US 1st pressing. They are the next-best option IMO, so I buy a lot of them.

FWIW my role model has always been John Peel. He never stopped actively exploring and I refuse to do so too. I can’t think of anything more boring or irrelevant than obsessing over endless Beatles box sets or whatever. I honestly couldn’t be less interested in that when there is a whole new music scene to deep-dive.

PS I’ve watched a bit more and Ken Kessler is having a quite astonishing boomer-rant! Any respect I once had for him is evaporating fast. He and Fremer just come across as angry old men arguing against their increasing irrelevance in the modern music and audio marketplace. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but give it a watch and see if I’m wrong!

 

[kensalriser]

I’ll chuck this here as it almost fits. Fremer, Kessler, Michael 45 and ‘Stunty’ discussing reviewing. I’m only about 20 minutes and it is all a bit ‘boomer cringe’ to put it mildly; old men discussing old music seemingly oblivious to a whole exciting world of new music that has exploded on other platforms and sales mediums. There is a self-importance to both Kessler and Fremer that I find really off putting. Elderly woefully out-of-touch white men criticising a ‘new’ they haven’t even bothered to locate. I guess we are all guilty of it to a degree, but I at least recognise it and certainly buy more current music than reissues. So much amazing genre-melting stuff around at present, yet these people seem stuck in a ‘major label/dad-rock’ mindset. I’m pretty sure Michael 45 is younger than me, he has no excuse at all!

When I ventured back into the s/h hi fi market in 2019 to buy some pieces after many years of just enjoying what I had, I was astonished that two of the sellers I visited to collect demonstrated their items with Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac respectively. Neither was old enough to have bought those releases first time around.

 

[Tony L]

When I ventured back into the s/h hi fi market in 2019 to buy some pieces after many years of just enjoying what I had, I was astonished that two of the sellers I visited to collect demonstrated their items with Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac respectively. Neither was old enough to have bought those releases first time around.

It is timeless music that everyone knows, plus has the stereotype of being ‘audiophile music’, so I guess they were just doing what is appropriate to sell hi-fi kit. I’ve no issue with that and I’d do the same (I tend to reach for Donald Fagen’s Nightfly as it sounds great on everything!). Far more likely to be acceptable to a random buyer than playing some really banging techno, Stockhausen or thrash metal!

PS Even jazz is disliked by some people who are wrong.