Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Achieving Better Sound
Let me be clear: conventional wisdom applied to collecting higher quality vintage vinyl pressings will be right more often than it is wrong. If it were the other way around, it would not be wisdom, it would be folly.
The person who applies the kind of advice you see described below will surely end up with a decent collection of records, records which will no doubt be better sounding than if he were buying records randomly.
As we said, conventional wisdom generally gets more records right than wrong. More right than wrong, yes, but plenty wrong just the same. That is the subject of this commentary.
Mr. edgewear does us a huge favor by laying out a great many of the most popular tenets of record collecting advice in the two posts below. (I probably found his post on the Steve Hoffman forum discussion of Hot Stampers. It goes on for days.)
I plan to follow up on some of these assertions in greater detail. (Please note that “assertions” is the most accurate description of the information Mr. edgewear provides, as there is simply no effort made to provide evidence of any kind to back up his pronouncements, the standard operating procedure for the internet.)
Let’s look closer at some of the most likely results if someone were to follow the advice offered above.