Letter of the Week – “Your hot stampers forced me to work on my stereo and on my room.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (italics added):

Hey Tom, 

Many thanks for your efforts.

Things can sometimes really be easy. I [purchased] medical water from the drugstore, hopefully the best available here in Austria.

Now I know the difference between a Super Hot and a White Hot. After half a minute it was clear.

The Super Hot of Dark side is really, really excellent but the White hot makes (at least) a step up on every aspect. Will send the Super Hot back shortly.

What I like to mention is:

Your Hot Stampers forced me to work on my stereo and on my room.

Tom is totally right when he says, only work, work and even harder work gives you benefit in HI-FI. I think it´s the Dopamine in our heads that drives us for better and better, it´s a great feeling.

I will never be an expert in HI-FI or Hot Stampers, that’s your business. But I can become mediocre or even good, can become a listener who has developed listening skills and has a stereo which is reasonably OK.

The first benefit (beside the sound of your Hot Stampers) I already got: improving my stereo and my listening skills just a bit gives me a lot more listening pleasure on my existing records, and there are a lot, especially in Metal and extreme Metal.

Kind regards from Austria,
Hans

Hans,

Thanks so much for your letter. We are glad to have encouraged you to work on your system and listen more closely to your vinyl, the same areas of effort that changed everything for us and appear to have done so for you. Congrats on that!

I have written the following or something very much like it to a number of customers over the years. I mostly talk about the amazing Hallographs we use, but solving room problems is at the heart of what we are trying to convince audiophiles to do. Please to enjoy.

Thanks so much for your letter. When your system is cookin’ and you’re hearing all your records sound better than ever, that’s when audio is FUN. You had to do a lot of work to get there and the good sound you are able to enjoy now is your reward.

It’s amazing to me how little audiophiles are interested in actually making their stereos sound better. You reap what you sew in this hobby. Mediocre sound is easy; good sound is very very hard — that’s why I so rarely hear anything outside of my own system that strikes me as any good. Most audiophiles haven’t worked very hard on their stereos and they have the sound to prove it.

We write a lot about the ENERGY and POWER found on the best pressings of some recordings; the BS&T record we sent you is a perfect example. It’s the kind of recording with so much going on that it is guaranteed to bring practically any stereo system to its knees. When a record such as this gets loud, all the problems of your stereo become impossible to ignore. (One reason the turn up your volume test is such a great test; the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.)

Turn Down the Volume, or Solve the Problem?

Rather than simply turn down the volume, why not solve the problem? That’s what the Hallographs help you to do. All that energy that’s bouncing around your room is causing huge amounts of distortion.

If you’re like most audiophiles it’s one of the main reasons you can’t play your system loud. The sound will become strident, edgy and sour; the soundstage will lose its shape and collapse into a chaotic mess; the bass definition will go out the window, turn bloated and get up into the midrange where it had no business being .

These are mostly room problems. 

No matter how good your equipment is, these problems are endemic to listening rooms in the home.

Concert halls aren’t twenty feet wide, but there sure are a lot of listening rooms that size, and smaller, which means room reflections are sending the sound waves crashing into each other all over the place.

The Hallos help control these reflections. Other products do too I’m sure but the Hallos are the best we’ve heard for the money. (Some room treatments are ridiculously expensive, way out of my price range. I’m sure not going to lose any sleep over what they do because I simply can’t afford them.) The Hallos are so good we give you your money back if you don’t like them.

Help Is On The Way

Or you can choose not to be bothered. Me, I like my music loud, the way live music is loud. Hallographs let me have my sound. I wouldn’t bother to play my stereo if I didn’t have Hallos in the room, because that would mean it couldn’t give me the sound I want. As Franklin well knows, Hallographs are a change that impacts everything positively. With your first pair you may very well find yourself doing what Franklin is doing: going back through all your favorite records and taking it all in. That’s when audio is FUN.

Can Hallographs solve all your problems for you? Hell no. But they can help you, with a little work, to solve some of them. And in my book, that’s a lot.

Best,
TP

Further Reading

Our lovely listening room, fit for a king.

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