• The uses and abuses of rules of thumb

 Some audiophiles use the following rule of thumb for rock and pop record collecting:

If it’s an English band, get the import pressing. If it’s an American band, the tapes should be here in this country, so the original domestic pressing will be the best.

As a rule of thumb it’s not bad. It’s just wrong so often (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Peter Gabriel, The Eagles, etc.) that you must be very careful how stringently you apply it.

• Progress means that sometimes a record sounds worse than it used to

As we like to say, all these audiophile pressings sound great sitting on the shelf. When you finally pull one out to play it, you may find that it doesn’t sound nearly as good as you remember, and that’s potentially a good thing.

It might be a sign you are making clear progress in this hobby.

Ten years from now, if during that time you’ve worked hard on your stereo system, room, electricity and all the rest, your Heavy Vinyl pressings will also have plenty of flaws you never heard before. They were there, you just didn’t know it. Once you start to hear the faults of these modern remasterings, you might want to start making the kind of notes that we do.

• Are there general rules for acquiring records with the highest sound quality?

The answer, of course, is that there are no such rules and there never will be.

There is only trial and error. Our full-time staff has been running trials — we call them shootouts  and needle drops — for more than twenty years now, with far more errors than successes. That’s just the nature of the vinyl LP.

It may be a tautology to note that the average record has mediocre sound, but it nevertheless pays to keep that statistically undeniable fact in mind.