More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions
We definitely don’t know it all. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
If we knew it all, we wouldn’t need to play the piles and piles of records we listen to every day. We would already know which pressings should have the best sound and all that would be left to do would be to assign them a sonic grade and list them for sale on the website. This approach would have the added benefit of cutting our labor costs in half.
But that is not remotely the reality of the world of records for those of us who play them and listen to them critically.
It’s the reason we formalized the concept into a Better Records Record Collecting Axiom, in this case Axiom Number Two: No two records sound the same.
Learning Is Fun
We learn something new about records with practically every shootout we run. That, more than anything else, is what makes the kind of tedious, time-consuming, mentally-exhausting work we do fun.
It’s how we’ve managed to find some of the best sounding pressings in the history of the world, like this one. (Maybe we should point out that Harry Pearson found it first, but it’s highly unlikely he heard one sound as good as our copy. For one thing, the best cleaning fluids hadn’t been invented yet.)
The stuff we were wrong about, and there has been plenty, you can find right here on the blog, often under the heading live and learn.
It should be said that most audiophiles, at least the ones I know well, do not have the patience to critically analyze ten different copies of the same record for hours on end. For our listening panel, it’s all in a day’s work.
I learned to critically listen for extended periods of time back in the early 80s. I got heavily into — obsessed with might be more accurate — tweaking my table setup, system components, wires, vibration controlling devices and anything else I could possibly imagine might have an effect on the sound of the system.
Listening for differences in interconnects and listening for differences in pressings calls upon precisely the same set of skills. If you can do it all day, if you actually like tweaking and analyzing the sound of your stereo for hours and hours, you will undoubtedly end up with a much better sounding system, as well as one helluva high quality collection of records (and some very finely honed listening skills).
If your stereo is working right and your ears are able to recognize good sound, then you surely know by now just how poor the sound quality is on the hundreds of records listed here. The fact that they were marketed to audiophiles would be funny if it weren’t such a tragic waste of money.
On the road to better sounding records? Here’s a good way to chart your progress.
Further Reading