Basic Concepts and Realities Explained
This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — the three big ones are time, effort and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it than you ever dreamed would be possible.
Especially if you use our approach. It works for us and there’s no reason it can’t work for you.
Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can get your hands on.
There are four basic steps you must take, and you have to do right by each of the four if you are going to be successful at discovering and evaluating your own Hot Stampers.
We discuss every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this blog. Although none of it will come as news to anyone who has spent much time reading our stuff, we cobbled together this commentary to help formalize the process and hopefully make it easier to understand and follow.
If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly and carefully and above all scientifically than most audiophiles and record collectors apparently think is necessary.
Don’t be one of those guys. Do it right and get the results that are out of reach with any other approach.