More on the Subject of Developing Your Critical Listening Skills
UPDATE 2023
This commentary was written around 2006, about two years after we started to put Hot Stampers on our website.
This is one of the early ones we wrote to help explain what we were up to.
You learn almost nothing from the same record played back on the same system.
What you must do is learn to listen for differences in the sound, and differences only come about as the result of a change.
You have to change something in the system to develop your critical listening skills.
How about this example: the difference in sound between any two sides of a record.
The only change there involves flipping the record over. No new equipment, no tweaks, no shootouts with dozens of alternate pressings. Just flip the record. How hard can it be?
Almost no record has the same sound on both sides, not the records we sell anyway. Where else have you ever read such a thing? Nowhere else, at least to my knowledge. Because not enough audiophiles and no — and I mean no as in zero — record dealers make the effort to listen critically.
If you can’t hear the difference on at least some of your records, it has to be one or both of the following.