F. A. Hayek summarized his views well when he noted that:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
Our curious task has been to demonstrate to audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them how mistaken they are to think that they can understand the sound of a recording by playing a small number of pressings of it.
Similarly, the modern mastering engineer operates with the understanding that he can design and operate a cutting system that produces sound superior to that which was produced by the engineers of the past.
Based on the hundreds of remastered records we have auditioned, this is clearly a case of overpromising and underdelivering.
These assumptions, and the mistaken approach to record collecting that flows from them, are clearly unsupportable.
The scores of commentaries we have written on both subjects provide all the evidence required to falsify them, and — with a fair amount of effort, sorry for the trouble — can be found among the 5000+ postings on this blog.
The Hot Stamper pressings we offer, so much bigger, livelier, and more engaging than anything produced by these so-called audiophile mastering houses, are simply the physical evidence of our deeper and more correct understanding of the true nature of records and their mysterious and confounding properties.
Digging Deep
Everything we think we know about records is based on strictly empirical findings, findings that resulted from critically auditioning thousands and thousands of albums. Many of these albums we have played by the score. For some titles, such as the more popular Beatles’ albums, we have played more than a hundred copies.
No one else has ever dug as deep as we have into the mysteries of pressing variations, for the simple reasons that no individual or group would be motivated to do so and have the resources required to accomplish such a feat.