F. A. Hayek summarized his view succinctly when he noted that “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Our curious task has been to demonstrate to audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them how mistaken they are to believe that they can understand the sound of a recording by playing a single pressing of it.
Similarly, the modern mastering engineer operates under the pretense that he can design and operate a cutting system that produces consistently superior sounding records compared to those made in the past.
Based on the hundreds of the modern records we have played, this is clearly a case of over-promising and under-delivering.
These assumptions, and the mistaken approach to record collecting that flows from them, are clearly unsupportable. The scores of commentaries we have written on both subjects provide all the evidence required to falsify them, and — with a fair amount of effort, to be sure — can be found among the 5000 postings on this blog.
The Hot Stamper pressings we sell, so much bigger, livelier, and more engaging than anything produced by these so-called audiophile mastering houses, are simply the physical evidence of our deeper and more correct understanding of records and their manifestly mysterious properties.
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