Please Consider Taking Our Advice on How to Make More Progress in Audio
If you believe what you read on the various internet sites where audiophiles gather to dispense advice about everything they think they know regarding music, recordings and equipment, you are asking for trouble and you are surely going to get it.
You will encounter an endless supply of half-truths, untruths and just plain nonsense, more often than not defended tooth and nail by those with typing skills but not much enthusiasm for the tedium of tweaking and critical listening.
What kind of equipment are these people using? How deep is their experience in audio?
Truth be told, I was pretty misguided myself during the first twenty (or thirty, gulp) years I spent in audio, reading the magazines (I still have my Stereophiles and Absolute Sounds from the 70s in boxes), traipsing from one stereo showroom to another, trying to figure out what constituted “good sound” so that I could manage to get my own equipment to produce something closer to the best of what I was hearing.
Most of the time what I heard made me want to go in a completely different direction. Which is often what I ending up doing when the solutions offered by the experts turned out to fall far short of what I considered acceptable.
Teach Yourself
So how do you learn about all this stuff?
Audio friends and fellow travelers can be very helpful. You might also get some tips and ideas from magazines and websites.
But ultimately it’s up to you to teach yourself.
We strongly believe that it’s the only approach to audio that has any chance of allowing the sound of your system to reach the highest attainable levels. Decent sound is everywhere. Exceptionally good sound requires decades and a gread deal of work. Most audiophiles will never be able to hear it for themselves outside of the concert hall.
Next Steps
Much of the commentary on the site has to do with the real nuts and bolts of the recordings we review — exactly what to listen for, detailed information on what are the sonic strengths and weaknesses of different songs or passages in the music, and more along those lines.
Lately we have been publishing many of our shootout notes, including those that go into detail as to what aspect of the sound might be lacking.
This is what we listened for, it’s how we separated the wheat from the chaff, and we offer it on the site as a guide to help you recreate the very same magic on your own stereo in your own home.
A Bother?
What other record dealer on the planet would bother? But we do it for a reason. We charge a lot of money for our best LPs. We want to help you understand and appreciate what makes our pressings special, so that when you buy them, you do so knowing that the price will be more than justified by the quality of the sound you hear when you get it home and play it.
Ultimately the records speak for themselves. If we are going to charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars for rock records like After the Gold Rush or Rumours, records that were produced in the millions, those records had better deliver, and deliver in a big way.
Some of our customers told us that the records we sent them were so good they could hardly believe it. But we knew exactly what they were talking about — we’d already played them ourselves!
Further Reading
- These records helped us improve the quality of our playback
- Robert Brook has plenty of good advice for the dedicated analog audiophile
- For audiophiles just getting started, beware of LPs that are likely to inhibit your progress
