wired magazine and Tom Port

In the late 80's Tom's apartment and mine were a couple of blocks apart, his very near the corner of Ventura Blvd. (as immortalized by Tom Petty in his song "Free Falling") and Van Nuys Blvd. It was a great neighborhood---locals like Johnny Ramone, Dave Edmunds, and Billy Swan could be seen getting a coffee, bagel, or newspaper on the street. Sherman Oaks has now joined the rest of the Valley in becoming a ghetto.

Both Tom and I moved away, and it looks like he's done pretty well for himself, as his current room is much bigger than his tiny apartment in Sherman Oaks was. Back then his prices had yet to escalate to where they are now; I got a "hot" pressing of the German "Magical Mystery Tour" LP for something not-too-bad, maybe twenty five bucks, I don't remember. Luckily (I guess!), I have more records now than I have hours left in this lifetime to listen to! So Tom will have to get by without more of my money.

His "reference" system uses a Dynavector 17D3? "Tubes make everything sound warm and add distortion" is his reasoning behind using an old solid state amp? The guy is a joke, his absurd prices notwithstanding.

Yeah, weird to see those kind of components in a system used to evaluate the sound of LP's. He's obviously never heard a high performance system. I should have had him over to hear the Quad ESL/ARC/VPI-Rega-Grado rig I had when he was down the street. Looking back at him now, I do seem to recall he struck me as a know-it-all kinda guy. I remember he made very little eye contact, always a sign that something is not quite right with a person. He also never stopped moving, very fidgety, with a lot of nervous energy. Other than that he was cool ;-).

I wonder if those who shell out the ridiculous amount of money for Port's hot stampers ever stop to think about the sheer absurdity of what he purports to be selling. I do agree there are differences in sound between pressings of the same record or even within the same pressing. However, there were hundreds of thousands of copies pressed, if not millions, of many of the most popular records he sells. The idea that you can go out there, find a few copies of those records, do a "shootout" and find a "white hot stamper" over and over again with different titles based on his resources and process is statistically impossible.

What I suspect is happening is that he obtains several copies of a title and grades them within that batch based on their sonic merit. The best sounding of the batch gets a white hot stamper rating and a ridiculous sticker price to go with it. But in the absolute sense, another copy may sound just as good or better than his white hot stamper, based just on the number of copies pressed and the impossibly monumental task of listening to enough copies of the same record to label any of them superior to other copies. You can only compare among the copies you have. How many does he use in his shootout? 5, 7, 10, 15 (doubtful)? Never enough to be able to legitimately declare something is sonically superior to the 99% or even 75% copies out there that he'll never listen to.

Then the insecure and lazy well-off audiophiles pay the crazy price and blindly content themselves with the idea that their copy sounds better than any other copy out there, because a guy with no basic understanding of audio equipment told them so. Just sad.

The Dynavector 17D3 Phono Cartridge has a diamond cantilever and has a ruler-flat frequency response out to 30Khz. It was also an Absolute Sound Editor's Choice in 2014 and got their Golden Ear award in 2007. Maybe it's a good choice for an evaluation tool.

Also, Legacy Focus speakers and a Wheaton Triplanar aren't exactly meh.

Many of us tune our systems to sound good with as many records as possible. He needs his system to do the exact opposite. Maybe our gear selection choices are different because our goals are different.