More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). 

Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could sound.

In these posts he shares some of the things he’s learned since he started buying records at the age of ten roughly sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in his collection, although it cracked a long time ago and hasn’t seen a turntable in forever.)

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Perhaps you suspect the electronics of your system are not as neutral as you thought they were.

So let’s say you get rid of your euphonic tube equipment (vintage or modern, makes no difference, colorations are colorations) and switch over to something that’s less colored.

The sound is now cleaner, cleaner, more present, more alive, more “right there” the way live music is “right there,” not veiled or vague or recessed the way so many stereos (at least in my experience) tend to sound. (Hard to believe, but some audiophiles seem to like that sound.)

But perhaps the sound now lacks richness, because you no longer have the richness your tubes were adding.

Perhaps now the sound is not as smooth as you would like, because it’s not being smoothed over by the smooth-sounding tube equipment you were using.

It’s very possible that the change has caused you to be less less happy with the sound.

Welcome to the J Curve.

You started at one point on the J, you made some changes, and now you find yourself with inferior sound compared to the sound you had before.

You may decide to turn back, to restore the sound you had so that you can enjoy your records the way you did when you had euphonic equipment, tube or transistor.

Or you can keep moving in a forward direction (left to right) and eventually — who knows when? — you hopefully (yes, the proper use of the adverb for once!) will start ascending the other side of the curve and end up somewhere better off than where you started.

You solve the richness problem by finding ways to add richness to your overall tonality without the limitations and drawbacks of tubes. You fix other problems that you can now recognize were causing harshness and shrillness in your system because you no longer have any tube equipment  artificially smoothing out the sound.

You’ve ripped off all the Band-Aids, and now it’s time to heal the wounds by other means. Maybe you had some bad interconnects or power cords. It could be anything.

But you can’t see problems that are being actively obscured by the colorations of your equipment.

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