Month: December 2021

What Recordings Are Audiophile Writers Reviewing Now I Wonder?

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now

In the early seventies, when I was first becoming seriously interested in audiophile equipment, this was a well-known Demo Disc at some high-end audio salons.

Five years later I would have speakers larger and more expensive in real dollars than the speakers I now own. At a tender age I acquired Stereophile’s cost no object, state-of-the-art speaker system from the mid-’70s, the Fulton J. I was the youngest person ever to own a pair of the behemoths, a record that has never and will never be broken I suspect.

The other monster speaker from that time was the Infinity Servo-Static 1A, which I auditioned before buying the Fultons. During the audition the electrostatic drivers kept blowing if the level got up too high, so that was the end of that. Who wants a speaker that can’t play at realistic sound levels?

Of course, many of you may never have heard of Carmen McRae’s The Great American Songbook album, because the heyday for this record was probably 30-40 years ago, back when the audiophile magazines were actually writing about exceptionally natural, realistic recordings such as this one.

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Better Records’ (Abandoned) Record Collecting Axiom Number Two

What’s the Big Idea?

UPDATE 2026

This commentary about axioms is being reworked. Stay tuned for further developments.

However, you are free to enjoy it for the time-capsule insights from 2021 you will find here. We still agree with practically all of what we wrote, so no worries there.

It’s clear to us now that axiom is not at all the right word to use in describing what it is that we believe to be true about records and audio.

An axiom is often described as one of these three things:

1. A statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference.
2. An established rule or principle or a self-evident truth.
3. A maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit.

We stumbled upon the term Core Insight not long ago and realized it would be a much better fit for what we think we know.

A version of Core Insights as they apply to Hot Stampers would go something like this:

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