One of our good customers has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Bill, who also happens to be a very good customer of ours, recently had Robert Brook over for a visit to help him tweak and tune his setup.
The changes Robert was able to make to Bill’s system took it to the next level, or maybe even the one that comes after that. There are a lot of levels in audio!
As Bill said, even with a $6k phono stage and other comparably expensive equipment, the sound was still just OK.
Tedious, painstaking setup is the only thing that can make all that fancy equipment sound good, and Robert was the man with the patience to help out a friend who needed some guidance.
The magazines and the websites don’t talk much about these things, but we here at Better Records know that high fidelity sound is simply not possible without learning how to do the work and sweating all the details.
I only know of three people who followed my audio advice: Robert, Bill and Aaron, all of whom can be seen in the picture below.
For years I’ve been banging on about Legacy speakers, low-power transistor integrated amps, EAR 324p phono stages, Triplanar tonearms, 17dx cartridges, VPI turntables, Super Platters and motor controllers, Townshend Seismic Platforms, Hallographs, suspended cables, clean electricity, and the kind of tuning and tweaking that can take your system beyond where you thought it could go.
Even buying all this stuff used, the resulting system would still end up being a few tens of thousands of dollars. That said, I honestly don’t think you can achieve this level of sound with standard audiophile equipment, the kind you might see in a showroom or advertised on websites, at any price*.