Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity — and are willing to go the extra mile and pay the extra dollar to make that happen.

PROBLEM SOLVING in AUDIO

We have a section on the blog under the heading Making Progress that digs into the kinds of issues that audiophiles tend to run into, especially when they are first getting started. They’re the ones Robert Brook writes about in his commentary above, and they’re the ones that tripped me up over and over for decades after I first got started in this hobby sometime in the mid-70s.

It wasn’t until around 2005 that I stumbled upon, mostly through luck and audiophile friends, the elements that make up my current system.

Imagine being so clueless that you actually had to spend thirty years in a hobby before you figured out. That was me!

Of course I thought I had it all figured out right from the start. I was the proud owner of monstrously-large, ridiculously-expensive speakers, tube equipment (also expensive, and the latest and greatest cutting edge technology back in those days), Half-Speed mastered records, records made live directly to disc, fancy cables — you name it, I had everything required to play music at nearly-live levels with near-perfect fidelity.

All the most important boxes I was told about had been checked off right from the get-go in the 70s. I was all in, and for the next thirty years I did everything the audiophiles I knew liked to do: find and evaluate better gear, try new tweaks, and, more than anything else, learn to appreciate music that I had never heard before — some of it new, some of it very old.

These are all stories that have been told here on the blog in hundreds and hundreds of posts.

Everything changed when I started doing audio and records in ways that nobody I knew had ever done them before. (That also is a story that has been frequently told here.)

Taking the approach to audio and software that audiophiles tend to take — the bulk of the story Robert Brook tells in his commentary — can only get you so far. That’s the lesson I learned after spending my first thirty years in the hobby.

It’s why this blog is devoted to one concept above all others — the importance of being skeptical.

Requiring empirical evidence to back up whatever I might choose to believe was the shock that my system — my nervous one, as well as my audio one — needed to jolt it out of its comfort zone and force it to come up with a better way.

At the start I believed what I was told — hey, it seemed to be working, and who was I to argue with the “experts” anyway? I went along with the crowd, and I got the average results crowds tend to get.

This blog, as well as Robert’s, is simply trying to help you circumvent the bad ideas that we run into everywhere in audio these days. We’ve tried lots of them, most of them didn’t work, or didn’t work very well, and the good news for you, dear reader, is that we found others that we know do work.

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