Record Experiments Taught Us Practically Everything We Know
Shane Parrish writes:
Borrowed wisdom breaks under pressure because you haven’t earned it.
You’re trusting someone else’s compression without knowing what created it.
Earned wisdom, on the other hand, holds up because it’s rooted in your actual experience.
You know when it works, why it works, when to ignore it and when to bend it because you created the compression.
It’s amazing how far you can get in this hobby if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough. (See links below for more on these two drivers of success.)
To achieve real success you must be willing to devote huge amounts of time, money and effort to the pursuit of better home audio.
You will really go far if you’re willing to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding and appreciation of the sound of the various pressings you play.
If we thought like most audiophiles — that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best — we would currently be very unlikely to have a business selling a million dollars or more worth of Hot Stampers every year.
(For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how you go about acquiring them.)
Conventional thinking and wrong-headed thinking would have prevented us from achieving the progress we’ve made over the last twenty years, and they will surely impede your progress too.
However, if you choose to follow our approach, you are very likely to be amazed at the positive changes that will come your way.
Brain Food
We would encourage you to sign up for Shane Parrish’s Brain Food newsletter. It’s free.
Expect to see more of his ideas and insights coming to this blog.
That guy you see pictured at the top left with a record under his arm spent many of his days wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem).
Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could sound.
In these posts he shares some of the things he’s learned since he started buying vinyl at the age of ten, about sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked a long time ago and hasn’t seen a turntable in ages.)
Further Reading