Experimenting with records is the best way to learn about them. Hot Stamper shootouts are simply the name we came up with for the rigorous blinded experiments we do in order to find the best sounding pressings of the albums we play.
If you haven’t run an actual experiment under controlled conditions, you may have an opinion about the sound of a given record, you may even have experts who agree with you about that record, but what you don’t have is evidence to back up anything you or anybody else says.
It’s possible that when carrying out your experiments you may have allowed yourself to be fooled, or maybe you failed in some other way to run a proper shootout,
The audio world is drowning in pretentious knowledge, the kind that has no hard-won experimental evidence to support it.
We here at Better Records do things differently. We run experiments that tell us not which pressings should sound the best, but which ones do sound the best.
Our experimental results often disagree with whatever it is that the conventional wisdom of the audiophile community might have predicted.
As Richard Feynman points out below, that makes us right and them wrong, at least provisionally.
As you may have read elsewhere on the site, the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?
No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.
You must keep testing all the reissues you can find, and you must keep testing all the originals you can find.
Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of very special records. That’s why you must do them.
Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us), you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances in which you lucked out.
In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.
Further Reading