Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound
If by record collecting you mean collecting better sounding pressings of the albums you want to play. (If you just want to collect records because you like collecting records, you are definitely on the wrong site.)
Our system is fast, accurate and uncolored. We like to think of our speakers as the audiophile equivalent of studio monitors, showing us exactly what is on the record, nothing added, nothing taken away.
When we play a modern record, it should sound modern. When we play a vintage Tubey Magical Living Stereo pressing, we want to hear all the Tubey Magic, but we don’t want to hear more Tubey Magic than what is actually on the record.
We don’t want to do what some audiophiles like to do, which is to make all their records sound the way they like all their records to sound.
They do that by having their system add in all their favorite colorations. We call that “My-Fi,” not “Hi-Fi,” and we’re having none of it.
If our system were more colored, slower and tubier, a vintage Living Stereo record would not sound as good as it should. It’s already got plenty of richness, warmth, sweetness and Tubey Magic.
To take an obvious example, playing the average dry and grainy Joe Walsh record on our system is a fairly unpleasant experience. Some added warmth and richness, with maybe some smear and some upper-midrange suckout thrown in for good measure, would make it much more enjoyable.
But then how would we know which Joe Walsh pressings aren’t too dry and grainy for our customers to play and enjoy on their systems?
How do you tell which ones have the least amount of smear when you’re playing them back through a system that has smear built into it? On some systems, every record is smeary!
(I know smear when I hear it. The Mac 30s I owned in the 90s taught me the pros and cons of tube colorations. More on that subject here.)
How do you tell which pressings have a present, tonally correct midrange when you’re playing records through a system with a sucked out, tonally incorrect midrange?
Enough with the rhetorical questions already.
There is only one approach that works. The first thing you need to get is good sound – then you can recognize and collect good records.
A White Hot copy should have a near-perfect blend of Tubey Magic and clarity, because that’s what we hear when we play it on our system.
We are convinced that the more time and energy you’ve put into your stereo over the years, decades even, the more likely it is that you will hear our Hot Stamper pressings sound the way they should.