Record Collecting

Here is the record collecting commentary that got the ball rolling close to twenty years ago:

An erstwhile customer asked about our Hot Stamper pressing of The Dark Side of the Moon: “What is the FULL stamper matrix for this record… all the way around the dead wax?”

I replied that we never give out stamper numbers for the records we sell. The only way to find out the stampers for our records is to buy them.

The Basics

We here present a number of ideas and methods to aid you in finding the best sounding pressings of your favorite music.

One: The better your stereo gets, the fewer Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered pressings you will find to have acceptable sound quality. You will have set higher standards, and you will find few modern records able to meet them. We celebrated that milestone in 2007.

It’s hard to believe it took us that long, but it did. We started selling records to audiophiles in 1987. Twenty years seems like a long time, but maybe that’s how long it takes.

Having reached a higher level, you will swear off buying them — as these customers did — and you will end up with very few, perhaps none, in your collection.

You should certainly not have any of these disgraceful releases sitting on your shelves.

Two: Your collecting will be informed by the fact that no two records sound the same, even those with the same matrix numbers, labels and all the rest. For the audiophile who wants to acquire vinyl of superior sound quality, this one idea has the power to change everything you do in audio.

We don’t know what causes some copies of a record to sound so much better than other copies with exactly the same stampers. We know them when we hear them, and that’s pretty much all we can say we really know. Everything else is speculation and guesswork.

We have data. What we don’t have is a theory that explains the data. We firmly believe that no such theory exists.

Nor do we really need one. If you can clean and play records at a sufficiently high level, your ears will tell you which of them have the best sound. No other evidence or validation is needed. You will have your answer, even though, if you’re truly serious about records, it can only be considered a provisional one.

Our extensive ongoing research into records, as well as the development of higher quality playback, is what allows us to keep discovering superior pressings with each passing year.

Many of our “finds” are unknown to the audiophile community, mostly because the do not fit the conventional idea of what should be the best sounding version of any given album.

They might be from the “wrong country,” they might have the “wrong label,” they might be cheap reissues — none of that matters to us.

We’re focussed on one thing: higher quality sound, and we know that the only way to find it is through painstaking and expensive experimentation, or, as it is more commonly known, trial and error.

Some people see records as an investment. We do not. We think audiophile-oriented music lovers should pursue good sounding records for the purpose of playing them and enjoying them, understanding that the better their records sound, the more enjoyable they will be.

Collecting records primarily to build a record collection that can be sold at a profit in the future should be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Making mistakes is fundamental to learning about records, especially if you, like us, believe that most of the received wisdom handed down to record lovers of all kinds is more likely to be wrong than right.

And the faster you make them, the more you will learn the truths about records. And those truths will set you free.

Good Advice

Reality Checks

Deep in the Weeds

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds, various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and: What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne: How did it get here?

Top Quality Collections