*Critical Listening Advice

Good Audio Advice and Critical Listening Skills

Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

[This is an updated version of a commentary written in 2009.]

The latest Mapleshade catalog (Spring 09) has, along with hundreds of recommendations, this little piece of audio advice that caught my eye:

For much improved bass and huge soundstage, put your listening chair or sofa right against the wall behind you. Move your speakers in to 5’ in front of you and 7’ or more apart. No room treatments will yield this much bass improvement.

I literally had to read through it a couple of times to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. But every time I read it, it still said the same thing, so I know I can’t have been dreaming. This is crazy talk. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Well, it’s not all crazy. There is actually a factually true statement at the end of that paragraph. Yes, it is true that no room treatments will yield as much bass as sitting up against a wall. But why stop there? Bass, regardless of its source, immediately seeks out the corners of the room. That’s where the most bass will always be: where the room boundaries are. If you want to hear the maximum amount of bass your speakers are producing, put your head in the corner of the room down at the floor, where three boundaries intersect. Like the sound now? Getting enough bass are ya?

Along the same lines, for a “huge soundstage” try putting one speaker at one end of the room and the other speaker at the opposite end. Why stop at seven feet? My listening room is twenty feet deep; I can get a soundstage that’s twenty feet across without any problem at all.

I would just have to be dumb enough to think that doing such a thing would be a good idea.

Fellow audiophiles and music lovers, it is not. Let’s talk about why.

Room Reflections

The closer you are to anything that the sound coming from your speakers can bounce off of, right before or right after it reaches your ears, the worse the sound. You want to be as far away from everything as you can be, and this includes not only the back wall of your listening room, but the heads of other persons who may be listening with you. This is easily demonstrated. Have a friend or loved one sit next to you and listen critically to some music you know well. Now have that person leave the room. The sound will always get better (unless something else is very wrong). I have done this experiment many, many times and it only comes out one way: fewer near reflections, better sound.

This is why we have three pair of Hallographs in our listening room. They help control room reflections. Reflections are the main cause of bad sound in most listening rooms. The louder you play your stereo, the worse the reflections get and the more they screw up the sound.

We like to play our stereo very loud — much of the music we love demands it — and we simply could not turn up the volume the way we do without effective room treatments. Your first pair of Hallographs, even just “roughed in,” not at all tuned precisely the way they can be, will immediately allow you to play your stereo louder than you could before you installed them. (Since the first pair reflect the sound waves directly back to the listener, Hallographs do actually increase the sound level at the listening position, adding energy and dynamics.)

This is a good thing. It’s a clear sign they work.

One reason the Turn Up Your Volume Test is a tough one for most systems to pass is that the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

Sitting Close

Sitting close to the speakers eliminates much of the effect of room reflections. So does wearing headphones. I have never liked either approach to listening; both seem very unnatural to me. And sitting too close is a bad idea from my experience. Now, I can only speak for the sound of large dynamic multi-driver speakers, since those are the only kinds of speakers I’ve owned for the last thirty-odd years.

When you have multiple drivers there is a specific distance and height where the drivers blend correctly, or to be more precise, more correctly than any other distance and height. Finding the correct height and distance one should sit from one’s speakers may sound easy, but in fact it is very tricky. It took scores of hours of intense listening over the course of months to figure both out in my listening room.

One thing that made it more difficult is the Hallographs themselves. You can tune them to achieve just the right sound, but when you move your listening position, you must retune them for that position. With six units that obviously became a complicated job. But progress was obvious from the start, so it was just a matter of keeping at it, playing as much challenging music as we could and testing testing testing.

Since we play all kinds of records, all day, practically every day as part of regular shootout regimen, this was much easier for us to do than it would be for most audiophiles. But as I have told many in this hobby over the years, if you don’t do the work the only person who doesn’t get to hear better sound is you. I can come home to my good sounding stereo — I’ve done the work — but you’re stuck listening to all the problems you haven’t solved, right?

Learning How to Listen

There’s no problem with an untweaked stereo or an untreated room as long as you don’t mind mediocre sound. If you actually want good sound, you have to learn how to tweak your stereo and you have to learn how to treat your room. Neither one can be ignored. You have to learn how to do both.

And doing both is what teaches you how to listen, which is a skill that’s very hard to acquire any other way. This explains why so many audiophiles have such poor listening skills. They simply never developed them because they never needed them.

Think about it: Listening to music for enjoyment requires the exercise of no skills whatsoever.

Such is obviously not the case with tweaking. Tweaking your system requires that you listen carefully and critically in order to make the fine judgments that are essential to making progress. Progress in audio from tweaking often occurs in small, almost imperceptible increments.

Being so subtle, these changes force you as a listener to concentrate, to focus your attention, to bring to bear all your critical listening skills.

Naturally, these skills, like any skills, having been exercised, start to improve, and continue to improve as you continue to exercise them.

Everybody knows that practicing and challenging yourself will make you better at whatever you are trying to do.

But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to bettering your own audio skills, other than on this blog? Just how would you go about challenging yourself as an audiophile?

Easy.

Tweaking and experimenting with room treatments is one sure way.

Playing ten copies of the same album back to back and making notes about the sound of each side is another.

Adjusting the turntable sixty six different ways and seeing what the effects are on scores of different records works too.

All these things taught me a lot.

No amount of reading or advice was remotely as helpful as just getting down and messing around with anything and everything in my listening room.

As Van Morrison said: “No guru, no method, no teacher.”

Back to Mapleshade

And having done all that work, with the many stereos I’ve owned over the years as well as those of my friends, I can tell you categorically that the advice quoted above from the Mapleshade catalog is very, very bad advice.

Much of the advice in their catalog I found eminently sensible. If I had more time I would talk about some of it, but we have to spend our days playing and writing about records, not some company’s catalog, so that will probably never come to pass.

I will say this though: there is some real nutty stereo advice in there, so take whatever you read with a sizable grain of salt.

Further Reading

How Can Anybody Not Hear What’s Wrong with Old Records Like These?

beatlrubbeoriginalRecord Collecting – A Guide to the Fundamentals

More of the Music of Beatles

It is our strongly held belief that if your equipment (regardless of cost) or your critical listening skills do not allow you to hear the kinds of sonic differences among pressings we describe, then whether you are just getting started in audio or are a self-identified Audio Expert writing for the most prestigious magazines and websites, you still have a very long way to go in this hobby.

Purveyors of the old paradigms — original is better, money buys good sound — may eventually find their approach to records and equipment unsatisfactory (when it isn’t just plain wrong), but they will only do so if they start to rely more on empirical findings and less on convenient theories and received wisdom.

A reviewer most of us know well is clearly stuck in the Old Paradigm, illustrated perfectly by this comment:

It’s not my pleasure to be so negative but since I have a clean UK original (signed for me by George Martin!) I’ll not be playing this one again. Yes, there are some panning mistakes and whatever else Martin “cleaned up” but really, sometimes it’s best to leave well-enough (and this album was well-enough!) alone.

We can’t imagine how anyone can have a system in this day and age that can obscure the flaws of the original Parlophone pressings of Rubber Soul (or any other Yellow and Black label Parlophone pressing for that matter, other than Yellow Submarine and Oldies but Goldies).

[Here is another exception to that “rule.”]

This reviewer apparently does (as do some of our customers, truth be told), but we have something very different indeed. One might even consider it the opposite of such a system.

Our system is designed to relentlessly and ruthlessly expose the flaws of every record we play.

Only the best of the best can survive that level of scrutiny. Our system (comprising equipment, setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity) operates at the Highest Level of Fidelity we have been able to achieve to date. We are constantly making improvements to our playback system in search of even better sound.

Real Progress

But wait a minute, who are we to talk about being fooled? Bear in mind that as recently as 2000 or so we were still recommending DCC and other Heavy Vinyl pressings. These are records that, with few exceptions, I would have a hard time sitting through nowadays.

My system couldn’t show me how colored and lifeless they were then, but it sure can now.

It’s amazing how far you can get in 10 years [now 20] if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough, and are also willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio. This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers. Old thinking and wrong thinking can really slow down your progress.

Follow our advice and you will be amazed at the positive changes that are bound to come your way.

Training Your Ears

Of course, we should note that it helps to have a dedicated full time staff doing shootouts, including a full-time record cleaning person. All of the members of the listening panel were musicians with already well-trained ears when we hired them. From the start they had no trouble appreciating the differences between pressings.

I, on the other hand, am not a musician. Since the 70s, I’ve simply worked at trying to get my stereo to sound more like live music. Over many years, as it slowly improved, it allowed me to hear more and more of what was really on my records. I slowly gained the skills I needed to do the kind of critical listening comparisons that are currently the heart of our business. Let me be the first to admit it was rough going for about the first twenty five years. (Getting rid of my old tube system in the 2000s was a great leap forward.)

It has been my experience that most audiophiles are in that same non-musician boat. The problem seems to be that stereos are not nearly as good at teaching these skills as musical instruments are. Unless you are of an experimental mind and are willing to devote a great deal of your time and money to the audio game, you are unlikely to develop the skills necessary to critically evaluate recordings at the highest levels.

Unfortunately, playing into this vicious cycle, those same critical listening skills are the very ones you need to make your stereo revealing enough so that even subtle differences between pressings become not just clear, but obvious. Better ears lead to better stereos, but bad stereos make it hard to develop better ears. That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile.

Further Reading

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Iberia on Classic Records – What, Specifically, Are Its Shortcomings?

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

Album Reviews of the music of Claude Debussy

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records LP debunked.

The Classic of LSC 2222 is all but unlistenable on a highly resolving, properly setup hi-fi system.

The opacity, transient smear and loss of harmonic information and ambience found on Classic’s pressing was enough to drive us right up a wall. Who can sit through a record that sounds like that?

The Classic reissue has plenty of deep bass, but the overall sound is shrill and hard and altogether unpleasant. The better bass comes at a steep price.

Way back in 1994, long before we had anything like the system we do now, we were finding fault with the “Classic Records Sound” and said as much in our catalogs. (Sometimes. Sometimes we were as wrong as wrong can be.)

With each passing year — 29 and counting — we like that sound less.  The Classic may be on Harry’s TAS list — sad but true — but that certainly has no bearing on the fact that it’s not a very good record.

For a better sounding recording of Iberia, click here.

Here Are More Titles that Are Good for Judging These Recording Qualities

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How Ears Become Trained

Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

It’s amazing how far you can get in this hobby if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough, and are also willing to devote huge amounts of your time and effort to the pursuit of better audio.

This will be especially true if you are perfectly happy to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding of the sound of the records you play.

If we thought like most audiophiles, that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best, there would be no such thing as Hot Stampers. Old thinking and wrong thinking can really slow down your progress.

Follow our advice and you will be amazed at the positive changes that are bound to come your way.

Training Your Ears

Of course, we should note that it helps to have a dedicated full time staff doing shootouts, including a full-time record cleaning person. All of the members of the listening panel were musicians with already well-trained ears when we hired them. From the start they had no trouble appreciating the differences between pressings.

I, on the other hand, am not a musician. Over the years I simply tried to get my stereo to sound more like live music. As it improved over the years, it allowed me to hear more and more of what was really on my records. I slowly gained the skills I needed to do the kind of critical listening comparisons that are currently the heart of our business. Let me be the first to admit it was slow going for about the first twenty years.

It has been my experience that most audiophiles are in that same non-musician boat. The problem seems to be that stereos are not nearly as good at teaching these skills as musical instruments are. Unless you are of an experimental mind and are willing to devote a great deal of your time and money to the audio game, you are unlikely to develop the skills necessary to critically evaluate recordings at the highest levels.

Unfortunately, playing into this vicious cycle, those same critical listening skills are the very ones you need to make your stereo revealing enough so that even subtle differences between pressings become not just clear, but obvious. Better ears lead to better stereos, but bad stereos make it hard to develop better ears. That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile.

Although we make plenty of mistakes, we think of ourselves as experts when it comes to evaluating the sound of records and stereo equipment. (Experts make mistakes; they just make fewer of them.)

But the practical consequences of these findings are that few audiophiles can ever hope to achieve expert critical listening skills. It takes too much time and it takes too much work. Most people are in this hobby for fun. They already have a job. They don’t need another one.

Perhaps there’s another, better way to look at it. Most people are not going to become scratch golfers, but they can still get better at the game. There is a balance to be achieved between working hard to improve your skills and having fun at the same time.

What has driven me in this hobby has always been the music.

When I play a record I love, I want to be able to hear it right. If I can’t hear it right, I don’t enjoy it. If enjoying it means finding a better sounding pressing, then that’s what I have to do. If it means improving the stereo or room, then I must find a way to make the stereo or the room sound better.

This is the most frustrating aspect of our audiophile pursuits. It is not often easy to find the right record or make the right change to the stereo or room. But this is the challenge we face if we care enough about the music to want to hear it right.

Let the music be your guide. If the sound of most of the records you play satisfies you, great. If it doesn’t, and you want better pressings, we’re here to help. And if you want to improve your listening skills in order to better your stereo or your record collection, you know what to do.

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Tuning and Tweaking Are Essential to Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

More on the Subject of Developing Your Critical Listening Skills

Improving your critical listening skills is what allows you to make Audio Progress.

Better quality audio allows you to collect better sounding records.

Since we play all kinds of records all day, practically every day, as part of our regular shootout regimen, tweaking and tuning are much easier for us to do than they would be for most audiophiles. As I have told many in this hobby over the years, if you don’t do the work, the only person who doesn’t get to hear better sound is you. I can come home to my good sounding stereo — I’ve put in the work — but you’re stuck listening to all the problems you haven’t solved, right?

There’s no problem with an untweaked stereo or an untreated room as long as you don’t mind mediocre sound. If you actually want good sound, you have to learn how to tweak your stereo and you have to learn how to treat your room. Neither one can be ignored. You have to learn how to do both.

And doing both is what teaches you how to listen, which is a skill that’s very hard to acquire any other way. This explains why so many audiophiles have such poor listening skills. They simply never developed them because they never needed them. Think about it: Listening to music for enjoyment requires the exercise of no skills whatsoever.

Such is obviously not the case with tweaking. Tweaking your system requires that you listen carefully and critically in order to make the fine judgments that are essential to making progress. Progress in audio from tweaking often occurs in small, almost imperceptible increments.

Being so subtle, these changes force you as a listener to concentrate, to focus your attention, to bring to bear all your critical listening skills.

Naturally, these skills, like any skills, having been exercised, start to improve, and continue to improve as you continue to exercise them.

Going About It

Everybody knows that practicing and challenging yourself will make you better at whatever you are trying to do.

But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to bettering your own audio skills (other than on this web site)? Just how would you go about challenging yourself as an audiophile?

Easy.

Tweaking and experimenting with room treatments is one sure way.

Playing ten copies of the same album back to back and making notes about the sound of each side is another.

Adjusting the turntable sixty six different ways and seeing what the effects are on scores of different records works too.

All these things taught me a lot.

No amount of reading or advice was remotely as helpful as just getting down and messing around with anything and everything in my listening room.

As Van Morrison said: “No guru, no method, no teacher.”

Further Reading

Frames of Reference, Carefully Conducted Shootouts and Critical Listening

Hot Stamper Decca and London Pressings Available Now

180+ Reviews and Commentaries for Decca/London/Argo

The sound we were hearing on this copy during a recent shootout was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments heard in the work. The legendary 1959 Decca Tree microphone setup had worked its magic once again.

And, as good as it was, we were surprised to discover that side two was actually even better! The sound was more spacious and more transparent. We asked ourselves, how is this even possible?

Hard to believe but side two had the sound that was TRULY Hard To Fault.

This is precisely what careful shootouts and critical listening are all about.

If you like Heavy Vinyl, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl can sound fine. It’s only when you have something better to play that its faults come into focus.

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Jackson Browne’s Debut – Smooth or Detailed, Which Is Right?

More of the Music of Jackson Browne

Hot Stamper Albums with Choruses that Are Big and Clear

The real trick with this album is in striking the right balance between richness and presence. A White Hot Stamper from years back made me change my mind about this recording. I used to think it was dull, but I was wrong. I used to think that even the best copies of this recording sounded rolled off on the top end. I no longer believe that to be true. On the best pressings the top end is correct for this music.

It took the right pressing to show me the error of my ways.

Side one of that copy was rich and full and sweet as can be. Playing side two I noticed more transparency and clarity, especially in the guitars and voices. It seemed to have correct highs, highs that were a little soft on the first side.

But the more I listened, the less I liked it. It started to sound more like a record and less like music. Going back and forth between sides one and two, it was obvious that side one had less clarity because it had the kind of richness and fullness that made all the musicians and their instruments sound real in a way that wasn’t happening on side two.

Side two had clarity, it had transparency, but it kept reminding me that it was a recording.

Side one allowed me to forget that I was playing a record.

When the music started, my attention was completely focused on the songwriting and the performing. Aspects of the recording were lost in my enjoyment of the music. I kept thinking what a great album this is, not what a great recording it is. That tells me that both the recording engineer and the mastering engineer did their jobs right. They created a sound that best served this music.

I think if an audiophile label had produced a version of this album that sounded like side two, most audiophiles would love it. They would hear detail that they’d never heard before. (It’s my belief that the original Asylum master tape has been lost, so the details of which we speak can be heard on these good originals and nowhere else.)

But, fooled into listening for details in the music rather than the music as a whole, they would never know how RIGHT the album can really sound.

The best of our Hot Stampers are the ones that have the right sound for this music.

How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on a Given Album?

Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Hot Stampers – The Four Pillars of Success

Doing carefully controlled shootouts with large groups of records is the only practical way anyone can teach themselves what to listen for.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

    1. First you go deep into the sound.
    2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
    3. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes obvious what they “did to it” in the mastering, and how far short if falls when compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound. 

Our critiques are often quite specific about the sound of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some Testimonial Letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are buying vintage pressings in the meantime, not audiophile records, you are probably not wasting much money.

Every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered anything more than a stop-gap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally find a better sounding vintage pressing in acceptable condition.

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Judy Collins – Sometimes the Hits Are Mastered from Sub-Generation Tapes…

More of the Music of Judy Collins

And there’s not much you can do about it.

Both Sides Now, the Top Ten hit that finally put Judy on the map, is clearly made from a copy tape and doesn’t sound as good as the songs that follow it on side two. Hey, it happens, and I suspect it happens more often than most audiophiles think. I would wager that back in the day most people who bought this album never even noticed.

One thing I’ve noticed about audiophiles over the years is that they’re pretty much like most people.

The difference of course is that they call themselves audiophiles, and audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality.

They may care about it, but are they capable of evaluating high quality sound? What is the evidence for the affirmative in this proposition?

Are they actually capable of critical listening?

Do they listen critically enough to notice a dubby track on an otherwise good sounding record when they hear it?

Or dubby sound in general?

Or to notice that one side of a record often sounds very different from another?

Or that some reissues sound better than the originals of the album?

Or that there is no reliable correlation between the country that a rock band comes from and the country that made the best sounding pressings of their albums?

Evidence in the Negative

The embrace of one third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing after another by the audiophile community has rendered absurd the pretense that their members ever developed anything beyond the most rudimentary critical listening skills.

Sadly, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the best explanation for the sorry state of audio these days, means they simply don’t know how little they know and therefore see no reason to doubt their high opinions of themselves, their equipment and their acumen.

Progress in audio is possible, but it helps to know that you are not already at the top of the mountain. The first thing you need to do is to appreciate just how much serious climbing is left to do.

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Put Us to the Test! We Can Tell a Good Record from a Bad One, Digital or No Digital

Skeptical Thinking – The Key to Better Sound

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide

And we don’t need to know anything about how it was made in order to judge it!

For those of you who did not follow this story last year, you may want to catch up here.

Although it’s behind a paywall, you can get a free test drive easily enough.

Now that you are up to date on the overall contours of this mess, here is another one of the many thoughts I have had concerning the revelation that Mobile Fidelity has been secretly sourcing at least some of their masters digitally since 2015.

Back in August of 2022, I wrote what you see below to Geoff Edgers, the reporter who exposed this ridiculous mess. (I toned it down quite a bit. The original version was not suitable for publication.)

Earlier that same year he had visited me at my studio, where I played him the awful Dire Straits first album that MoFi remastered, one of the worst half speeds ever made (review coming, but you can get a good idea of my take on it here).

By August of 2022 he was starting to see just how crazy the world of audiophiles actually is, and the more he learned about some of these people, the crazier they seemed. And he was not wrong about that. My letter:

Jim Davis (of MoFi) is not one to be trusted and would have loved to cover up this whole thing if he could have figured out how to do it. It got away from him, and as far as I’m concerned, good.

And you heard how shitty their Dire Straits record is. Who cares if it’s digital? The sound is bad. Why bother trying to figure out the reasons this crappy label doesn’t know how to make a good record? It’s just a fact. Accept it.

Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums.

From the article:

“One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.

“These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”

The best ears? Are you kidding me? In their dreams. These guys give every indication that they are virtually devoid of critical listening skills. The evidence has been laid out in this very blog, chapter and verse, for years.

Yes, a perfect blinded test was conducted, the kind we run day in and day out, and every one of these so-called audiophile authorities failed it completely.

Here’s an idea. Test us! We can tell a good record from a bad one, digital or no digital.

We do it for a living.

Based on everything that has happened, here are the conclusions we would draw from this sorry episode revealing the fraud that is at the heart of the Modern Remastered Vinyl LP.

The digital process MoFi used probably resulted in a loss of subtle musical information.

Many audiophiles can’t hear what they are missing on these remastered pressings on account of their untrained listening skills and their playback systems’ relative lack of quality. (Audio is hard.)

We hear what’s missing because we have the records that are overflowing with all that information.

If it goes missing, it’s obvious to us that something is wrong. It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a sort, and the scientific method has been crucial to our success. You just have to learn how to do it properly in order to set you on the right path.

Some of our customers who own Heavy Vinyl pressings are in the enviable position of having in their possession a record that can show them what is wrong with the ones they own. It warms our hearts when they write to tell us of the lessons they learned playing our Hot Stampers against their remastered LPs.

What could be simpler or more obvious? Until now all I had was my opinion about these guys, and let’s face it, talk is cheap.

Finally the facts have come out and they support everything I have been saying for years about this label’s awful records and the misguided souls who collect them.

You really made my day. A great article that lays everything out clearly with just the right amount of information. I hope the article you do on me is as good. (It was.)

Bravo.

TP

One final thought.

Anyone who has been on their audio journey for any sizeable length of time has made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Uniquely among reviewers and record dealers, we go out of way to admit when we’re wrong.

You might even say we are proud of the fact that we used to get so many things wrong about records and audio.

Our experimental, evidence-based approach, requiring that we not only make mistakes but that we embrace them and learn from them, is surely key to the progress we have made in understanding recordings and home audio.

Further Reading

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