Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

This Bob Thompson record never even made it to the hall of shame. Like hundreds of other albums we’ve played and found wanting, we could not be bothered to make a listing for it.

I don’t recall its specific shortcomings, but I vaguely remember that it basically just sounded too much like an old record. Some stereo systems of a more forgiving nature can mask the faults of records like these and even make them somewhat enjoyable.

Such is decidedly not the case with our system. Just the opposite in fact. Our stereo is designed to ruthlessly expose the shortcomings of every record we play, precisely the job we need it to do.

We are in the fault-finding business. A stereo such as ours allows us to recognize and describe the manifold problems of hundreds of records that others with — we assume — less revealing equipment do not seem bothered by.

We learned about the strengths and weaknesses of records the old fashioned way. We auditioned them by the thousands over the course of the 37 years we’ve been in business.

Unlike other record dealers catering to audiophile clientele, physically playing old records all day is how we make our money. In the case of this Bob Thompson Living Stereo from 1960, engineered by none other than the often-brilliant Al Schmitt, we were hoping to find top quality sound and music with acceptably broad appeal.

If we found those two things, we could then get hold of a bunch of copies — probably for cheap, let’s be honest — clean them up, shoot them out and sell the best sounding, quietest copies to our customers for prices that would more than cover the time and money it typically takes for our crack staff to carry out each of those operations.

It didn’t work out that way for On the Rocks. Most of the time it doesn’t with albums sporting cool covers from artists that we know practically nothing about. But we do it anyway. It’s how we discover records that few people know have the potential for audiophile sound quality. We know of no other way to do it, and we especially like knowing things that other people don’t know.

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