Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Below is a link to a review Robert Brook wrote for a pressing of the album I had loaned him so that he could hear just how good ELP’s debut can sound on one of our hottest Hot Stampers. Please to enjoy.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Why You NEED a Hot Stamper of THIS Record!
Robert’s Approach
Robert has methodically and carefully — one might even say scientifically — approached the various problems he’s encountered in this hobby by doing the following:
- Improving his equipment,
- Teaching himself how to do a better job of dialing in his turntable setup.
- Learning how to do controlled shootouts for his favorite albums, and, most importantly of all:
- Carefully testing every aspect of audio and records empirically, using his ears — and nothing else — to guide him.
- Sometimes Robert has an interesting take on some aspect of records or audio which we have found consistently worth reading and can surely recommend highly.
Based on what I am seeing from Robert Brook, he has a good stereo, two working ears, and knows plenty about records and what they are supposed to sound like.
His story is not that different from my own. At the start of his journey, he found himself going in a particular audio direction. He was making some progress, but felt that he needed to take a different approach to get the sound he imagined was still eluding him.
Fighting the inertia that holds us all back in our lives, he reversed course and now finds that he is making progress by leaps and bounds, progress that surely would have been impossible had he stayed on the road he was on.
I did the same thing. I simply stopped believing what I read or was told and started testing everything for myself.
By 2004, after only 30 or so years in the hobby, that approach paid off. I had made enough progress in audio to officially start doing regular shootouts for vintage pressings I knew from experience to have top quality sound, potentially anyway.
Teaser and the Firecat was the first Hot Stamper pressing we put up for sale. Our customers were ecstatic to pay ten times the going rate to get a pressing of Teaser that sounded better than they’d ever even imagined the album could sound. They have since written us lots of nice letters, more than 400 to date.
Since that time we’ve never looked back. Why would we? Our customers were buying Hot Stampers like they were going out of style. Records would go up on the site and sell in minutes.
Now, with a staff of ten, and having discovered much better ways of doing practically everything involved in finding Hot Stampers, not the least of which is using the knowledge we have gained from the thousands and thousands of different pressings we’ve played over the years, we feel confidant our records can hold their own against any and all comers. Especially those being produced these days.
Bring it on, we say, and some audiophiles do. Most do not, but we’ve long been resigned to the fact that there’s little we can do about that. Even with a money back guarantee, the idea of Hot Stampers is just too absurd for some folks to wrap their heads around.
Robert Brook, I am happy to say, had no trouble taking the leap. He has been reaping the rewards ever since.