Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments
In an old commentary we wrote for Carole King’s Tapestry album, we took shots at both the CBS Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile pressing and the Classic Heavy Vinyl Audiophile pressing, noting that both fell far short of the standard set by the Hot Stamper copies we had been playing (and enjoying the hell out of) for years.
This finding (and scores of others just like it) prompted us to promulgate the first two axioms of audiophile record collecting.
Better Records Record Collecting Axiom Number One
The better your stereo gets, the fewer Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered pressings you will choose to play, or own for that matter.
This assumes a fact not in evidence: that audiophiles get rid of their bad sounding records.
It has been my experience that the reverse is actually more often the case. Most audiophiles seem to like to hang on to their audiophile pressings, even the bad sounding ones. Why they do this I cannot for the life of me understand.
To me a bad sounding audiophile record is a record that has no business being played and should either be tossed or sold, with any proceeds from the sale applied to the purchase of good records — you know, like the ones found on this site.
Click here to read Better Record’s record collecting axiom number two.
Further Reading
- New to the Blog? Start here
- Record collecting for audiophiles from A to Z
- How to get the most out of your records – a step by step guide
