Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is to serve as:
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Robert gets off to a good start with his opening paragraph:
Even though I still regularly buy and add records to my collection, my long term goal is to have fewer and fewer of them. So from time to time I go looking through my bins for records that I might just as soon part with. When I recently ran across a copy of Nina Simone Sings Ellington sitting at the very back of my jazz section, I fully expected to give it one last spin and place it in the “sell” pile. Instead, it ended up landing right at the very front of my current rotation.
Readers of this blog know how often I stress that records that spend their lives sitting on a shelf aren’t doing anybody any good.
As for Nina herself, we rarely do shootouts for her records because they rarely sold well upon release, which means they are hard to find and they therefore command relatively high prices among collectors. They are also rarely in audiophile playing condition. (Colpix vinyl? We wish you good luck — you’re going to need it.)
For those who would like to know more about the lady and her recordings, here are reviews for the albums of Miss Nina Simone.
And the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? comes highly recommended as well.
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, with only his ears as his guide
- Sometimes he just has something interesting to say about records, which fits in nicely with our own predilections.
More on Robert’s system here. You may notice that it has a lot in common with the one we use. This is not an accident.
And it is also no accident that these two systems just happen to be very good at showing their owners the manifold shortcomings of the modern remastered LP, as well as the benefits to be gained by doing shootouts in order to find dramatically better sounding pressings to play.