Robert Brook recently wrote a piece making the case that the cure for audiophile ailments of all kinds — burnout, boredom, etc. — is a high quality stereo system. It is beautifully written and we think well worth your time to read.
Robert walks us through what it has meant to him to have spent so many hours over the years building a high quality stereo system, mostly by describing the musical enjoyment it has brought to him.
What could be better?
We feel the same way. If you build such a system, and play the right records on it, you will experience the music you love in ways more powerful than you could have ever even imagined. Your favorite albums will sound so good that boredom and burnout would be simply inconceivable.
Those of us with top quality systems are confused by the dysfunctional relationship these poor souls have to their stereos and recordings. With a good stereo and good records, it’s hard to see how these psychological states are even possible.
The Heart of the Problem
The problem audiophiles have is one that sits right at the heart of our hobby.
Good stereos are hard to come by.
So the question always comes down to how one should go about building such a beast. There are two schools of thought.
Is the first priority to have properly-pressed, properly-mastered records of well-recorded music in order to get the ball rolling?
Or is it better to make improvements to the stereo first, so that you can then pursue better sounding records and end up with the best of both worlds, a great stereo playing great records?
My Two Cents
Allow me to weigh in. Please consider the following unusual, even goofy, and possibly logically inconsistent, analogy.
Imagine that the place where you can enjoy music is a town not far from where you live.
Because you love music, you must travel there as that is the only place you can enjoy your favorite music to its fullest.
The Horse and the Cart
The horse that draws the cart that you ride into this town is not the right record, it is the right stereo in the right room.
Without the right stereo, you lack the ability to recognize the right record.
Similarly, you lack the ability to appreciate what makes it more right than any other record.
Without the right stereo, you may in fact be trying to optimize the playback of records that are wrong. I did this for decades with my Mobile Fidelity records in the 70s and 80s. I played Heavy Vinyl pressings in the 90s and early 2000s that sounded right to me at the time but no longer do, mainly because our current system evolved over a very long time to be ruthless at revealing their deficiencies and my ears became better at recognizing them.
Vintage Pressings
Eventually, I found a number of vintage pressings that would allow me to radically improve the sound of my stereo.
They were great test discs for me back in the day, and many of them still are.
Ella’s Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie was a big one. Tea for the Tillerman was too. There were scores of them. It was very slow going. It seems to have taken me at least fifteen years, from about 1990 to roughly 2007.
And all this came to pass after I had already been in audio at a high level for fifteen years before that. These are years 16 through 30! I really thought I knew what I was doing. Looking back, I see that before 1990 I was as lost as lost can be. Had the sound of the system not continued to improve, I might have ended up as one of those bored burnouts.
But the simple fact was that I did not allow myself to become bored or burnt out because I couldn’t afford to.
I had started a record business that had to be successful if I was going to be able to continue to pay my rent. I needed to be able to audition records and to correctly judge their sound quality to the best of my ability. I would be able to recommend “better records” to the subset of customers who came to me looking for top quality sound.*
So I kept improving my stereo however and whenever I could.
The Stereo Gets Going
Once my stereo started to improve, it made it easier to find better sounding records to play on it. I continued to make changes to it that would actually improve the sound of a record that I thought was right, even though I now know many of those records were not as good as I thought they were. But I was making progress. I was recognizing more good records and getting fooled by fewer bad ones. At least that’s what I thought at the time. I still had a long way to go.
Tweaking and tuning the stereo and room using great recordings properly pressed onto great records is what allowed my listening skills to improve, and those virtuous circles kept going around for another 30 years.
Those of you who have some of our Hot Stamper pressings own records that already have the right sound, so you can skip over some of the troubles I went through, back when I didn’t know what I was doing and had to teach myself pretty much everything I needed to learn.
Hot Stampers Aren’t Enough
But Hot Stampers only allow you to get around a very limited number of problems.
All the work that needs to be done to play these records and to make them sound better requires a huge commitment of time and money. In my case, it was a lifelong effort.
You can stop whenever you like, but if you stop before you have a great stereo, you have stopped too soon no matter how many killer records you own.
You Pull
The records won’t get you to where you need to be. They can help, but they don’t pull the cart. You do. You’re the horse. You thought you would get to ride into town in the cart, carried there by the fancy equipment you bought, and the audiophile records you played, but those didn’t get the job done. Everyone told you how great all this stuff was, but it doesn’t seem all that great to you. You miss the fun you had listening to music before you bought all this supposedly new and improved stuff.
Now you’re forced to confront the fact that the only way to get to a better place is for you to ignore what all the audiophiles and the reviewers were telling you. They said that you could just buy your way there, but now you know better. You know that’s not how it works. You know you have to hop down and start doing the work you didn’t want to do. You have to do the hard pulling because the cart doesn’t seem to want to move on its own no matter how much money you spend on new equipment and new records.
You now realize that you must do the work of improving your system, electricity, room, setup and who-knows-what else. No one else can do it for you.
If you stop before you create the system that can blow your mind, again and again, on record after record, the kind that Robert has and the kind that I built and left behind in our Westlake studio for the use of the listening crew at Better Records, you may find yourself as bored and tired as the folks complaining on that Audiogon thread.
90/10
The Pareto Principle allows us to put a number to audio’s harsh reality, to wit: “20% of your actions/activities will account for 80% of your results/outcomes.”
I put the ratio closer to 90/10. To find the ten percent of equipment, tweaks and other changes that will really make a positive difference in the sound of your system, odds are that you will fail the other ninety percent of the time.
My guess is that a very high percentage of the bored and the burnt out are made up of those guys who got tired of failing.
They had no one to guide them and they gave up.
Anyone reading this blog or Brook’s has help that was never available before, and therefore few excuses.
I hope audiophiles avail themselves of the advice we can give, having failed ninety percent of the time yet stuck with it.
And if you want Hot Stamper pressings of some of your favorite albums, I encourage you to avail yourself of those too. That’s when the work of getting them to sound their best begins.
Thanks for reading,
TP
*Not all of them were looking for top quality sound, of course. My prices had to be competitive to go up against the audiophile mail-order giants of the day.
And I foolishly endorsed a lot of records that I would be mortified to recommend now. In the mid-90s I put out a catalog that had titles on the cover that I now know were not at all good, the worst of them being Witches’ Brew on Classic Records.
Further Reading