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Paraphrasing Hayek – Our Curious Task

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F. A. Hayek summarized his views well 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 think that they can understand the sound of a recording by playing a small number of pressings of it.

Similarly, the modern mastering engineer operates with the understanding that he can design and operate a cutting system that produces sound superior to that which was produced by the engineers of the past.

Based on the hundreds of remastered records we have auditioned, this is clearly a case of overpromising and underdelivering.

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, sorry for the trouble — can be found among the 5000+ postings on this blog.

The Hot Stamper pressings we offer, 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 the true nature of records and their mysterious and confounding properties.

Digging Deep

Everything we think we know about records is based on strictly empirical findings, findings that resulted from critically auditioning thousands and thousands of albums. Many of these albums we have played by the score. For some titles, such as the more popular Beatles’ albums, we have played more than a hundred copies.

No one else has ever dug as deep as we have into the mysteries of pressing variations, for the simple reasons that no individual or group would be motivated to do so and have the resources required to accomplish such a feat.

Pseudo-shootouts are easy to carry out.

Real shootouts are hard, and doing more than a few dozen without the help of a large staff and an even larger budget would be practically impossible.

Audiophiles, like most people, are often tempted to pretend to know more than they really can know. We call that kind of knowledge “pretend knowledge,” since there is nothing to back it up but the will to believe.

We think running experiments is the fastest and easiest way of finding out what you really know and don’t really know about audio and records.

The most important skill any audiophile should be trying to improve is his ability to think skeptically.

Thinking skeptically is at the heart of everything we’ve achieved in audio. It has worked for us and we know it can work for you.

Pretentious Knowledge

When someone pretends to know things they cannot possibly know, or think they know things that simply are not true and can be easily demonstrated to be false, such a person can be said to suffer from a “pretense of knowledge.”

Some of the theories that audiophiles believe — original pressings have the best sound, the first pressings off the earliest stampers sound better than later pressings — are best understood as articles of faith. There is rarely much data to support them. They’re so commonsensical no data is needed to back them up, so none is ever offered.

“Made from the master tape,” “no compression or equalization was used in the making of the recording,” “AAA, all analog mastering,” etc., etc., are all forms of pretentious knowledge that should never be accepted at face value.

Anyway, these claims and others like them are beside the point.

Records must be judged only by the way they sound, not by what may or may not be true about the processes, equipment and good intentions of those who make them.

Further Reading

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