A skeptical take on an old claim, using the Gold Standard of Double Blind Testing.
In the record shootouts we do during the week, we evaluate records using something very much like the double blind testing mentioned above.
It’s what makes us unique in the world of record dealers and collectors. We allow the records to speak for themselves.
With the evaluation process we use, there can be no influence or bias from the reviewer’s preconceived notion of what pressing should sound best, because the person sitting in the listening chair does not have any way of knowing which pressing is actually playing.
This is not quite true for audiophile pressings, since the VTA must be adjusted for their thicker vinyl. The way such evaluations are done is simple enough however. We play a top quality Hot Stamper pressing, typically one that received a grade of White Hot (A+++), check the notes for what the test tracks are and what to listen for, and then proceed to test the Heavy Vinyl pressing on those same tracks, listening for those same qualities.
It rarely takes more than a few minutes to recognize the faults of the average audiophile pressing.
When played head to head against an exceptional vintage LP, the audiophile pressing’s shortcomings become all too obvious. Again and again, the audiophile pretender is found to be at best a second- or third-rate imitation of the real thing, if not downright awful.
How the sound of the modern remastered mediocrity has managed to impress so many self-identified audiophiles is shocking to those of us who have been working to get the best sound from our records for a very long time, developing both our systems and our critical listening skills over the decades.
In defense of these surprisingly easily-impressed audiophiles, I should point out that even we were fooled twenty years ago by many of the Heavy Vinyl records produced around that time, such as those on the DCC label and some by Speakers Corner, Cisco and others. It took twenty years to get to where we are now, taking advantage of much better equipment, better cleaning technologies, better room treatments, and the like, most of which did not even exist in 2000.
A turning point came in 2007 with the Rhino pressing of Blue, a record that made us ask, “Why are we selling records that we would not want to own or listen to ourselves?”
In closing, there is one fact that cannot be stressed enough, which may seem like a tautology but is nevertheless axiomatic for us:
Doing record shootouts, more than anything else, has allowed us to raise our critical listening skills to the level needed to do shootouts correctly. It’s also how we became expert listeners.
Without that process, one which we painstakingly developed over the course of the last twenty-five years, we could not possibly do the work we have set out for ourselves: to find the best sounding pressings of the most important music ever pressed on vinyl.
To learn more about how to conduct your own shootouts and gain the critical listening skills that come from doing them, click here.
Further Reading
Record Shootouts Are Tricky – Here Are Some of the Lessons We’ve Learned
