Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Below you will find a link to Robert’s story about the improvements he heard in his stereo by doing some experiments we had recommended he do, experiments which, for reasons unknown to the wider audiophile community and generally dismissed by same, managed to take his system to places he never expected it could go.
All at the cost of exactly zero dollars. It’s quite a ride, check it out:
BETTER ELECTRICITY: Small Changes Yield Some VERY BIG RESULTS!
We have written a fair amount about the benefits of feeding the system better juice ourselves:
The value of experimenting with electricity is part and parcel of tweaking and tuning your system to reveal the many levels of improved sound locked within it. As we noted in our discussion of the Pareto effect:
The amount of tweaking you do with your setup, components, room, electricity and the like is the only thing that can take you to the highest levels of audio.
The unfortunate reality audiophiles must eventually come to grips with in their journey to higher quality sound is thatyou cannot buy equipment that will get you there.
You can only teach yourself, painstakingly, over the course of many, many years, how to tweak your equipment — regardless of cost or quality — to get to the highest levels of audio fidelity.
And tweaking and tuning your equipment has other, fundamentally more important benefits in addition to its original purpose of making your stereo sound better.
At most 20% of the sound of your stereo is what you bought.
At least 80% is what you’ve done with it.
Based on my experience, I would put the number closer to 90%.
I suspect that Robert Brook, having heard for himself the remarkable improvements he achieved by simply throwing a few breakers in his home, would be the first to agree with Mr. Pareto.
In a nutshell, Brook’s main goal in audio is to get the recordings that mean the most to him to come alive in his home.
Like me, he is a thrillseeeker, and proud of it. Getting better stereo sound has been my life’s work. It’s not just at the heart of our business, it’s the very reason we created a business in the first place. Our goal from the start was to offer the audiophile public the finest sounding pressings ever made. (We didn’t really know how to do that for the first fifteen years of our business, but that is a story for another time.)
Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered scientifically, methodically and carefully, along these three fronts:
- Improving his equipment,
- Teaching himself how to do a better job of dialing in his turntable setup, and
- Learning how to do controlled shootouts for his favorite albums.
“Bravo” to a job well done.
More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.
And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.
Further Reading
- Revolutions in audio, anyone?
- Basic concepts and realities explained
- Our stereo (and thoughts on equipment)
