Advice to Help You Make More Progress in Audio
Some audiophile reviewers opining at great length about the sound quality of various kinds of discs — both compact and vinyl — prefer to review only those that sound good to them and simply ignore the rest. (A small sample of the writings of one such reviewer can be found here on the blog, but there are doubtless others who follow the same approach.)
We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.
Needless to say, we see our role differently. Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things.
They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.
They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.
We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.
It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.
No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a fraction of the records that we have. We’ve been looking for the best sounding pressings of records for a very long time, more than forty years.
Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.
That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.
Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.
We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.
The impossibility of predicting the sound of records is one which we learned to accept as axiomatic. As a born skeptic, this was never difficult for me. Early on in my audio career, sometime in the ’80s, I realized it was self-evident.
The solution we put into practice given the nature of records comprises the four principles we adopted:
- We stopped pretending to know something that can’t be known.
- We stopped relying on theories proven to have very little if any predictive effect.
- We stopped relying on the experts and so-called authorities.
- We stopped assuming and speculating and, importantly, we stopped worrying about getting it wrong.
What remained was the simplest possible approach to the problem that would actually work. One that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by skeptical record collectors.