Advice to Help You Make More Audio Progress
Below you will find a list of most of the equipment we have been using over the last twenty years or so to carry out our Hot Stamper pressing evaluations, or “shootouts” as we like to call them.
Naturally the reality of the 80/20 Rule comes into play here — 80% (probably more like 90 or 95%, truth be told) of the sound is what you do with your audio system, 20% (or 10 or 5%) of the sound is the result of the components you own.
We like to say it’s not about the audio you have, it’s about the audio you do: how you set up your system, what you’ve done to treat your room, how good your electricity is and all the rest of it.
- Our VPI Aries (original, not the latest model) with
- Super Platter (no longer made) and
- TTWeights Carbon Fiber Platter (a big upgrade, no longer made).
- VPI Synchronous Drive System (as of 2016 now sitting on a Townshend Seismic Sink).
- Triplanar tonearm.
- Dynavector 17dx.
- Aurios (no longer made), which sit on a
- Townshend Seismic Sink (another big upgrade).
- EAR 324P and the hundreds of hours we’ve spent setting up and tweaking this beast is at the heart of everything we do around here.
- We love our modified Legacy Focus speakers.
- Even more now that they have much improved high frequency extension courtesy of Townshend Super Tweeters.
- Mix in extensive room treatments, aided inestimably by three pairs of Hallographs (as we like to say, there is practically no Hi-Fi without them), more than thirty years of experience and endless hours of experimentation and you have a system that can separate the winners from the losers like nobody’s business.
- Exactly like nobody’s business, because nobody does it in this business but us. Having heard hundreds of systems over the years, it’s an open question as to whether anyone else could do what we do even if they tried.