Stop Doing These Things and You Too Will Start Finding Better Sounding LPs

Our Guide to Collecting Better Sounding Records

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of individual pressings is one which we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I had never had any difficulty wrapping my head around.

At some point in my audio career, probably in the early-90s, about twenty years into my audio journey, I realized it was in fact beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there apparently is a sizable number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it was simply a fact.

What to Stop

Given the unpredictable nature of records, the five most important aspects of the solution we put into practice were these:

  1. We stopped pretending we could know something that can’t be known. [1]
  2. We stopped relying on theories proven to have virtually no predictive effect. [2]
  3. We stopped paying attention to the experts and so-called authorities. [3]
  4. We stopped assuming and speculating. [4]
  5. We stopped worrying about getting it wrong. [5]

It took many years, decades even, to learn what worked and what didn’t work in our pursuit of better records. We came to realize over that span of time that the five things listed above were hindering us in doing our job, so we stopped doing them.

What remained was the simplest possible approach to the problem. One that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by experimentally-minded record collectors.

  1. Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
  2. Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
  3. Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
  4. Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds better than all the others.
  5. Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
  6. Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
  7. Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.

That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve higher rates of success.

Failing Forward

Edison is said to have failed 10,000 times before inventing a light bulb filament that had a practical use.

Most audiophiles do not have the time and money, not to say patience, needed to fail again and again this way.

For us, having a full-time staff of ten and a rather large record buying budget, we see failures as just another part of the job. Our successes pay for them, since obviously somebody has to, Milton Friedman’s famous remark about free lunches being as true as ever. This partly accounts for our prices being as high as they are.

We don’t make a dime from writing about records that don’t sound good to us. We review them as a service to the audiophile community. We play them so that you don’t have to.

You can find some of them in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. (Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records best avoided.)

We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play. Many of them are astonishingly bad.

We routinely put them into our Hot Stamper shootouts, up against the exceptional vintage pressings that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”

Clearly the term has lost all meaning, if it ever had any in the first place.

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