The uses and abuses of rules of thumb

Some audiophiles use the following rules of thumb when targeting higher quality rock and pop records:

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

As rules of thumb the ones above are not actually all that bad. Most of the time they will turn out to be correct. They’re just wrong so often (Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Peter Gabriel, The Eagles, Black Sabbath, etc.) that you must be very careful how stringently you rely on them.

Many audiophiles will never bother to test them, since such tests require money and time, often in very large amounts. He will more than likely be content to leave his prejudices intact rather than seek out disconfirming evidence. (Just ask John.)

Ultimately, the only reliable arbiter of truth is empirical evidence, evidence that can only be gained in a shootout, either to support or contradict the assumption that was made by using the rule of thumb.

In other words, they’re a good place to start looking for the answer, but they must prove themselves through a shootout to be the answer. Until then they are just a guess, and guesses often turn out to be wrong.

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.