Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s latest posting.

What Does NEUTRAL in Audio REALLY MEAN?

I wrote about this very subject in one of Robert’s postings from 2024, this one. Here is most of what I had to say at the time:

Dramatic limitations and massive amounts of colorations are endemic to home audio systems.

The only way to get rid of them is by doing the unimaginably difficult work it takes to learn how to identify them and then figure out practical ways to root them out.

This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished, even by the truly dedicated. It unfolds slowly, over the course of decades, and only for a very small percentage of audiophiles. Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. To attempt to go further feels like banging your head against a wall.

Regrettably, to push on in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves is for the few, not the many.

(Of course it didn’t hurt that we got paid to do it. An undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder also played a part, as did certain records that I fell in love with a long time ago.)

Pass/Not-Yet

In our opinion, some of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely.

They thought they’d come a long way, and perhaps they had, but there was still plenty of potentially life-changing improvement possible.

Can you blame them? Devoting the seemingly endless amounts of time and money necessary to climb the greased ladder leading to better sound is not a choice most audiophiles are in a position to make.

Wives, children, jobs, mortgages, and a great deal more — especially the lack of a dedicated listening room — all conspire to limit the efforts of even the most committed audiophile.

Not to pile on, but there is an easy way to spot these folks, the ones who could only take it so far:

1. 1. By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
   2. Or want to buy (ditto),
   3. Or have nice things to say about (ditto again, read the posts found on every audiophile forum).

We’ve made a partial list of the records that best identify this group, and it can be found here.

It should be noted that bad records, the kind being made by audiophile labels of every stripe these days, are no good for any of this work. The goal is to figure out how to make top quality vintage pressings sound right. (More on that subject here.)

Most new pressings will only sound enjoyable if the system playing them is good at hiding their flaws. We hope it goes without saying that no right-thinking audiophile should want anything to do with such a system, or such records.

And with his latest post, Robert Brook proves once again that he is an audiophile who knows what the goal of playing music in the home should be — to make it sound as natural and lifelike as possible — and, even more importantly, he recognized that it would take years of work to make that sound a reality, and knowing all that, committed himself to the task.

And why has he done all this work?

Because he is the one who gets all the benefits.

He gets to hear the greatest music ever recorded in a more powerfully immersive way than 99% of the audiophiles who share neither his approach nor his ambition. (You can add work ethic for the trifecta.)

If you want easy answers and quick fixes, Robert (and I) will tell you there are no such things in the world of audio. Until you’ve done the work, this way of thinking may seem counterintuitive and confusing, especially if you’ve spent much time on audiophile forums.

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