An Experimental Approach to Finding Better Records Is the Only One that Can Work
Experimenting with records is the best way to learn about them. Hot Stamper shootouts are simply the name we came up with for the rigorous blinded experiments we do in order to find the best sounding pressings of the albums we play.
If you haven’t run an actual experiment under controlled conditions, you may have an opinion about the sound of a given record, you may even have experts who agree with you about that record, but what you don’t have is evidence to back up anything you or anybody else says.
It’s possible that when carrying out your experiments you may have allowed yourself to be fooled, or maybe you failed in some other way to run a proper shootout,
The audio world is drowning in pretentious knowledge, the kind that has no hard-won experimental evidence to support it.
We here at Better Records do things differently. We run experiments that tell us not which pressings should sound the best, but which ones do sound the best.
Our experimental results often disagree with whatever it is that the conventional wisdom of the audiophile community might have predicted.
As Richard Feynman points out below, that makes us right and them wrong, at least provisionally.