Skeptical Thinking Can Help You Identify Records with Better Sound
What do you get when you buy a record on the Analogue Productions label?
In the simplest terms, you get a record that’s met 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 did the work for him that yes, they indeed succeeded in making him a record of the very highest quality. Their assurances — opinions might be the better word — are then backed up by those that market and review the very same record. Everyone operating in his capacity within this circular chain gets paid to agree that Chad’s records are indeed of the highest quality, exactly as would be expected by those who know how they were made. (Confirmation bias — hearing what you expect to hear — is surely the most powerful tool at the disposal of those who make and market audiophile records.)
Having played many of Chad’s records going all the way back to the mid-90s, let’s just say we see things a little differently.
We believe that what ends up happening with any given release 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.
As far as Chad is concerned, every one of them sounds great, because he can’t tell a good record from a bad one. He assumes they must be great because he paid top dollar for the best engineers and then spared no expense for the best practices they recommended to press them, all in order to produce what they assured him would be a superior product in every way.
Unfortunately, Chad had no way of determining if those assurances were ever 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 he very clearly needed to judge the records he was making, he borrowed it from the so-called experts he was paying to do the work. Everybody knows the conventional wisdom is never wrong, right?
Unlike yours truly, he never engaged in the slow, painstaking efforts, over the course of decades, that are 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, it’s 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 who he thinks are 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. In turn, that money 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 not. What difference does it make anyway?
What never happens is that he learns anything about the sound of the records he produces because he has no way of knowing what separates a good record from a bad one.
He makes records the way he thinks records should be made, the way everybody knows they should be made, with the best engineers, using state-of-the-art mastering equipment, then pressing them on the highest quality vinyl and packaging them to the highest standards in the industry. Mot of them are limited editions. Some of them are even numbered.
How they sound relative to other pressings is not something he is able to judge.
Fortunately for him, his customers are in the same boat. They seem to be impressed by even the most ridiculously awful releases he has put out.
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 reach is that none of them know just how bad their records sound.
We do, because we’ve played many of them against the 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 longer than that.
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.