Before we go any farther, we should make our position on these questions clear to our readers.

We’re really not that interested in big questions, mostly because there aren’t any big answers for them.

When it comes to records, being able to reveal deep underlying truths about a wide range of vinyl pressings is simply not possible. To be honest, we don’t think it can be done.

Knowledge

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of working knowledge. It’s that we have so much of it that we needed a blog to hold it all so that we could share it with others.

No, our working knowledge is made up of lots of little bits of data that guide us in discovering the best sounding pressings for the individual titles we choose to play.

It would be nice to have general rules to help us in our search for better sound on vinyl, but our experience tells us that general rules are so unreliable that they fail to function as rules at all.

The exceptions pop their heads up everywhere, causing us to lose faith in whatever rules we thought we could rely on. (As card-carrying skeptics, it’s easy for us to jettison bad ideas — they tend to cost us money. Others have the luxury of holding on to bad ideas because the psychological costs of doing otherwise are too great.)

In our business, the only rules we have available to us are rules of thumb, which are defined as: “methods or procedures derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method.”

Predictions

We would like to be able to predict — using, for example, things like labels, stampers, mastering credits, country of origin, etc. — which pressing of a given title is going to sound the best. Experience has taught us that such indicators rarely produce consistent results.

Without taking the time to clean and play lots of pressings from different countries, on different labels, with different stampers, produced by different pressing plants, we would simply be guessing as to which of them sounds the best.

And our guesses would be wrong much of the time, something we cannot allow if we want to stay in business.

That’s why we’re stuck doing expensive, time-consuming, carefully-controlled, blinded shootouts day in and day out. Shootouts are very slow and very costly, so if there was any way around them, you can be sure we would love to have taken it.

Right Answers

Shootouts give us answers that are reliable and reproducible, not only on our system, but, and this cannot be overstated, on the systems of our customers.

Shootouts make it clear to us which pressings have the best sound, and they save us from trying to predict something that’s almost completely unpredictable.

If your stereo resolves musical information at the highest levels the way ours does, the idea that no two pressings sound the same is more than a theory. To be clear, although it is a theory, since it cannot be proven, it is also very much a fact.