Skeptical Thinking Will Help You Identify Records with Better Sound
Chad Kassem, the man who founded Analogue Productions sometime in the 90s, claims that all his pressings are superior to those of his competitors, as well as all previous reissues, and — gasp! — even the originals, or perhaps it would be better to say especially the originals.
In doing so he makes claims that can be tested. Our commentary today will look at how he came to believe in the superiority of his product. Naturally we disagree with him about the quality of his records, and have been doing so since the early-90s.
But don’t these disagreements just boil down to one opinion differing with another, our opinion versus his?
As a matter of fact, no. It turns out there are ways to run experiments which are guaranteed to identify the record pressings that actually do have better sound. We at Better Records have spent more than twenty years developing and refining a great many of these methods. Given the necessary resources, these methods are sure to produce reliable data.
This is data backed by evidence. Testable data. Data derived from experiments that may not eliminate the value of opinions, but removes them from the position they occupy most often in the world of audio, front and center, and relegates them to the margins where they are more appropriate.
So let’s get back to the question we asked above: What do you get when you buy a record on the Analogue Productions label?
In the simplest terms, you get a record that meets with Chad’s approval.
Since Chad appears — at least to me — to have no critical listening skills to speak of, he must instead rely on the assurances of the engineers who work for him. Yes, they tell him, they succeeded in making him a record of the very highest quality. There are no conflicts of interest they say. We all love music and are just interested in making the best record we can. Unsurprisingly, we made he best version ever.
Their professional opinions are then backed up by those that review and sell these very same records.
Everyone operating in this circular chain gets paid to agree that Chad’s records are indeed of the highest quality, exactly what one would expect to hear frmo those who know how they were made. (Confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — is surely the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of those who make and market audiophile records.)
Having played many of Chad’s records, let’s just say we see — or hear — things a little differently.
We believe that what ends up happening with any given release of his is that if the engineers he hired to make the record do a bad job, Chad releases a bad sounding record. If they do a decent job, Chad releases a decent sounding record. If they do a good job — woops, scratch that, they never do a good job. (Or, to be fair, we have never played an AP record with especially good sound, but we can’t say one doesn’t exist. If you know of one, please contact us. We would love to hear it for ourselves.)
As far as Chad is concerned, every one of his releases sounds great, because he simply cannot tell a good record from a bad one. He assumes his records must be great because he did all the right things to make them great. He paid top dollar for the best engineers and then spared no expense for the best practices they knew of to master and press them, all of which were guaranteed to produce what they assured him would be a superior product in every way.
Unfortunately, Chad had no way of determining if any of those assurances were of any real value.
Turns out they weren’t.
Like a lot of audiophiles, Chad is a guy who never taught himself how to listen critically. He never saw the point in building a stereo from the ground up, one component at a time, tuning it and tweaking it until it sounded right on his most difficult-to-reproduce test records.
How could he? He doesn’t own any. He doesn’t even know what they are or why anyone could possibly need such things.
Instead of earning the knowledge that he needed in order to judge the records he was producing, he borrowed it from the so-called experts he was paying to know how to do the work. They followed the accepted practices. They did things they way they thought they should be done.
Everybody knows the conventional wisdom is never wrong, right?
Unlike yours truly, he could never be bothered to engage, over the course of decades, in the kind of slow, painstaking effort that is required to make real audio progress. That’s simply not part of his audio history. He bought whatever system the experts told him to buy and, since they’re the experts, whatever system he ended up with is by definition great at playing records. Why wouldn’t it be? It cost a lot of money!
All Chad really needs to know about the record business is that there are titles that record collectors will buy, and if he hires the right mastering engineers to make them and the right pressing plants to press them, they will sell.
If the records sell, he makes money. That money in turn allows him to make more records. In some cases, if he’s already made a certain title, he makes it again, perhaps using an improved process, or, at the very least, a different one. Two discs at 45? UHQR? From the real master tape? You name it, he’s tried it, and probably more than once.
What never happens is that he learns anything about the sound of the records he has produced. He’s simply not capable of recognizing the aspects of the sound that help to differentiate the good sounding records from the bad sounding ones. (Some examples.)
Without listening skills, he has to rely on the kindness of strangers knowledge of experts in the field. He makes records the way they tell him records should be made, the way everybody knows they should be made.
His job is simple enough — he gets hold of the master tape, he hires the best engineers, he makes sure they are using state-of-the-art mastering equipment, he then presses them using the highest quality vinyl, and finishes by packaging them to the highest standards in the industry. Most of them are limited editions. Some of them are even numbered.
How they sound relative to other pressings is not something he can be too concerned with. They’re the best ever, period. He has no way of knowing they aren’t, remember?
Fortunately for him, his customers are in the same boat. They seem to be impressed by even the most ridiculously awful releases he has been puting out for decades.
The very thought of such a state of things might be shocking at first glance, but for those of us who have been around audiophiles our entire adult lives, there is nothing in the least surprising about any of it. In fact, it’s par for the course.
All the companies operating today make bad sounding records, and based on the fact that they keep doing it — never making an even marginally better product — the only conclusion one can draw from this sad situation is that none of them really know just how bad their records sound.
We know how bad they sound, because we’ve played hundreds of them hed to head with the best vintage pressings of those very same titles. In most cases the results of these comparisons are shocking, especially if you’ve been working on your stereo for more than fifty years and listening to records for even longer like I have.
Unlike Chad, who’s “saving the world from bad sound” in the same way that Dr. Strangelove saved the world fron nuclear annihilation.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 as of 2026.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.
Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.