Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rickie Lee Jones Available Now
Ideally you need a basket of roughly five to ten well known recordings with which to test your equipment, tweaks, room, cleaning regimen and the like.
Don’t rely on any single recording to be The Truth. None of them are. (I found this out the hard way when tweaking the setup in our new studio in 2022.)
To illustrate this idea, imagine your stereo as a huge diamond. Every recording you play is showing you a different facet of that diamond, corresponding to a different strength or weakness of your system’s reproduction.
Audiophile X will play a record and say it has bad bass. His bass reproduction is excellent when playing other recordings, so record X, which he thinks has bad bass, is clearly at fault.
If you have been in audio for very long, you should easily recognize the conclusion this person has drawn as a case of mistaken audiophile thinking.
Audiophile Y plays the same record and says it has good bass. Assuming the record has good bass for a moment, what is in fact happening in Audiophile X’s system is that most facets of his bass are good, but some facet of his bass is bad, and this record is showing him some shortcoming in his bass reproduction that his other records are not capable of showing him.
If Audiophile X makes some changes to his stereo, and the record in question now has better bass, and, importantly, other records still sound as good or better than they used to, then some measure of success has most likely been achieved, and another step forward has been taken on that very long and often frustrating journey that we are on.
Flaws in the Diamond
The diamond has many flaws. We find them and fix them by regular tweaking and tuning, both of which have the added benefit of improving one’s critical listening skills.
To help you improve your stereo, room, electricity and the like, we have scores of records that are good for testing a great many aspects of audio reproduction.
Rickie Lee Jones’ first album is what we would call a bad test disc, for one very simple reason:
It can sound good on a system with a great many problems. It doesn’t expose sonic flaws as much as it hides them.
Port’s Rule states: If it isn’t easy for your test discs to sound wrong, they are not very good test discs.
If you are looking for tougher test discs, we have you covered there, with more than two dozen ballbusters guaranteed to bring any stereo to its knees. If you like a challenge, and own some of these records, preferably Hot Stamper pressings you bought from us (because we know those have the right sound; we played them), we invite you to have at ’em.
Here are some other titles that are good for testing the same qualities we look for on Rickie Lee’s first album, many with specific advice on what you should be listening for.
- These records are good for testing bass definition
- These records are good for testing midrange tonality
- These records are good for testing midrange presence
Further Reading