Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This listing is from many years ago, possibly as early as 2010.
- Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we go about finding them.
- We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
- Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of nowhere, to the surprise of the listening panel, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it fundamentally changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
- Breakthroughs often come about because the conventional wisdom we had been relying on up to that time turned out to be wrong. Regardless of how many original UK pressings of Abbey Road we might have cleaned and played, we would never have found one that sounds as good as this pressing does, simply because none of the originals ever came close to winning a shootout, and it’s very unlikely that one ever would.
An exceptional copy of The Beatles’ last and arguably greatest album with THE BEST SIDE TWO WE HAVE EVER HEARD — QUADRUPLE PLUS (A++++)!
If you’ve heard the disastrous new pressing, then you know how important it is to play a real, vintage, analog pressing. A copy this good might just give you a new appreciation for one of the Greatest Rock Albums of All Time. A permanent member of the Better Records Top 100, and a Desert Island Disc if ever there was one.
Abbey Road checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records. Here are three for starters:
- It’s a Must Own record.
- It’s a Rock and Pop Masterpiece.
- And it’s a personal favorite of mine.
The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as these.
Abbey Road is the very definition of a big speaker album. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.
This is one of the The Beatles’ many audio challenges that await you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic power, don’t expect to hear them the way the band, Geoff Emerick, George Martin and everyone else involved in the production wanted you to.
It’s clear that The Beatles albums informed not only my taste in music, but the actual stereo I play that music on. It’s what progress in audio is all about. I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for close to five decades, precisely in order to play demanding recordings such as Abbey Road, an album I fell in love with “all those years ago.”
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that have been winning our Hot Stamper shootouts for years.
The better copies sound their best:
Finding the right reissues of The Beatles’ music has taken my staff and me a lifetime of work. Speaking only for myself, I can also say that for more than forty years it has been immensely rewarding every step of the way.
The typical shootout notes for Abbey Road would look something like this.
