Developing Your Critical Listening Skills Is Key to Finding Better Records
It’s amazing how far you can get in this hobby if you’re obsessive enough and driven enough.
To achieve real success you must be willing to devote huge amounts of time, money and effort to the pursuit of better home audio.
You will really go far if you’re willing to let your ears, not your brain, inform your understanding and appreciation of the sound of the various pressings you play.
If we thought like most audiophiles — that money buys good sound and original pressings are usually the best — we would currently be very unlikely to have a business selling a million dollars or more worth of Hot Stampers every year.
Conventional thinking and wrong-headed thinking would have prevented us from achieving the progress we’ve made over the last twenty years, and they will surely impede your progress too.
(Be sure to avoid these kinds of records while you are at it. They’re nothing but a dead end.)
However, if you choose to follow our approach, you are very likely to be amazed at the positive changes that will come your way.
Training Your Ears
Of course, we should note that it helps to have a dedicated full-time staff doing shootouts, including a full-time record cleaning person. All of the members of the listening panel were musicians with already well-trained ears when we hired them. From the start they had no trouble appreciating the differences between pressings.
I, on the other hand, am not a musician. Over the years I simply tried to get my stereo to sound more like live music. As it improved over the years, it allowed me to hear more and more of what was really on my records. I slowly gained the skills I needed to do the kind of critical listening comparisons that are currently the heart of our business. Let me be the first to admit it was slow going for about the first twenty years.
It has been my experience that most audiophiles are in that same non-musician boat. The problem seems to be that stereos are not nearly as good at teaching these skills as musical instruments are.
Unless you are of an experimental mind and are willing to devote a great deal of your time and money to the audio game, you are unlikely to develop the skills necessary to critically evaluate recordings at the highest level.
Unfortunately, playing into this vicious cycle, those same critical listening skills are the very ones you need to make your stereo revealing enough so that even subtle differences between pressings become not just clear, but obvious.
Better ears lead to better stereos, but bad stereos make it hard to develop better ears.
That’s why I made so many mistakes and learned so little in my first twenty years as an audiophile.
Although we make plenty of mistakes, we think of ourselves as experts when it comes to evaluating the sound of records and stereo equipment. (Experts make mistakes, they just make fewer of them.)
But the practical consequences of these findings are that few audiophiles can ever hope to acquire expert critical listening skills. It takes too much time and it takes too much work. Most people are in this hobby for fun. They already have a job. They don’t need another one.
Perhaps there’s another, better way to look at it. Most people are not going to become scratch golfers, but they can still get better at the game. There is a balance to be achieved between working hard to improve your skills and having fun at the same time.
