Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals
I defy anyone who has not made a lifelong study of pressing variations to tell me which of the hundreds of records pictured below is likely to have audiophile quality sound.
There is not a chance in the world the owner knows either, and I suspect he does not care one way of the other. If this fellow describes himself as an audiophile, he is either mistaken or setting a very low bar for hinself.
An audiophile is defined as someone who “loves sound.” The owner of this collection may love sound on some level — he plays records, and they have sound, and if he loves the sound he hears on his records, that would make him an audiophile according to the dictionary.
For those of you who spend much time on this blog, to us an audiophile is a “lover of good sound,” not just any sound.
This fellow is not really an audiophile as we would define the term, certainly not much of one.
He is a record collector, plain and simple.
And that’s not a hard thing to be. Most anyone can amass a collection of records — one this big, ten times its size or one-tenth its size, the process of going about it is the same. You just buy whatever kinds of records you happen to like and organize them in whatever way you find most pleasing.