Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles
We explain — for free! — how anyone can find better records here.
If you want to know what you’re missing, there is only one approach that allows you to do that.
It involves two things that have made the modern world what it is today:
- Empirical findings based on the use of
- The scientific method.
Any other approach is doomed, not to failure, but to findings that are neither reliable nor repeatable.
To our knowledge, we are the only record dealers who use rigorously controlled, empirically proven testing procedures to make judgments about the sound quality of the pressings we audition.
That one fact, more than all the others combined — our playback quality, our philosophy, our decades of experience, our skilled listening panels — explains why we are able to offer the discriminating audiophile dramatically better sounding vinyl pressings than anyone else.
As a result of this scientific approach, the exceptional sound quality of the records we sell make it clear to audiophiles exactly what they’ve been missing. (Many have written us enthusiastic letters about sound they could hardly believe.)
Or, put another way, we make clear to them that they did not need to settle for the second- and third-rate sound quality of the Heavy Vinyl pressings they’d been buying because they didn’t know something better was available. (Many have written us letters of the shock they experienced when comparing our Hot Stampers to their audiophile pressings.)
We Didn’t Know Either
We didn’t know how amazingly good so many records could sound until about twenty years ago ourselves.
We found out starting in 2004 when we began doing shootouts.
These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons.
The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and noting the differences we heard made us better listeners.
We took our critical listening skills and applied them to tweaking and tuning our stereo and room in order to get as many colorations and limitations out of them as possible.
Through all this work we came to have a better understanding of the fundamentals of collecting better sounding records.
However, without a staff of ten finding, cleaning and playing records, it is the rare audiophile who should expect to be able to duplicate our results.
But they can certainly do a lot better using our approach than any other, an approach that is guaranteed to put them well ahead of all the audiophile reviewers and forum posters in the world combined.