Basic Concepts and Realities Explained 

Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

This commentary was written around 2006, about two years after we started to put Hot Stampers on our website. This is one of the early ones that got the ball rolling.

You learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same equipment.

What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change.

You have to CHANGE something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.

How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record. The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. Almost no record has the same sound on both sides, not the records we sell anyway. Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to my knowledge. Because not enough audiophiles and almost no record dealers make the effort to listen critically.

If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following. Either your system is not good enough to resolve these differences, which is sometimes the case, or, much more likely, you simply haven’t trained your ears to listen for them. Not listening for pleasure. Listening like it’s a job. Critically. Analytically. Try to listen for one quality by itself. Listen for grain, or top end extension, or bass dynamics — anything, the list is endless. Focus in on that single quality, recognize it, appreciate it, then flip the record over and judge that quality for side two.

Although we make plenty of mistakes, we consider ourselves expert when it comes to evaluating the sound of records and stereo equipment. (Experts make mistakes; they just make fewer of them.) 

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