Proper Record Cleaning Can Help You Find Your Own Hot Stamper Pressings

We gave the following advice to a customer who had just bought a record cleaning machine and was about to go on a tear cleaning his whole record collection — many of which were still sealed — to find the Hot Stampers lurking within.

We explained that this was not such a good idea. For one thing, you can’t find Hot Stampers without doing shootouts, and that means you need piles of the same title, which practically no one has.

You might find good sounding pressings among your old records, but even that will entail a great deal of work.

Since the average record sounds pretty average, and sealed records are unknowns in terms of pressing, mastering, etc., I would say it’s always a good idea to do a quick needle drop on a record before taking the time to clean it. The average record isn’t really worth cleaning, because it doesn’t really sound very good, so why waste the time?

Once you figure out what’s good and what’s not, you can start to target the better sounding records. This process typically takes about twenty years, but there’s no time like the present! If you want to skip all that time and effort, we are happy to get you the good stuff and save you from the bad. Such is the service we offer.

And one more thing: until you get your system cooking and really set up right, make a point not to buy any audiophile pressing of any kind. Once your stereo is working properly those pressings will more often than not show themselves to be lackluster if not downright awful. You won’t want to have too much time or money invested in that trash once you’ve learned just how bad it really is.

I’ve had many many customers over the years complain that they wasted so much money on those kinds of records and now don’t know what to do with them — a cautionary tale that every audiophile should be cognizant of, if they haven’t already lived through it themselves.

The better your system, the worse they sound; this is the key to understanding how you are doing in the hobby. When those audiophile pressings sound boring, wrong or both, and your plain old records start to give you a thrill like nothing you’ve ever experienced outside of live music, you are on the right road.

Someone sits in this room all day, running the records through our proprietary multi-step cleaning process. Every Hot Stamper pressing has been vacuum cleaned on multiple machines using The Prelude Record Cleaning System.

The Prelude Record Cleaning System is the only fluid we recommend for serious SOUND ENHANCEMENT and cleaning of your LPs. You have never heard what’s really in the grooves of your records until you’ve cleaned them using Walker’s system. There is nothing in our experience that works as well.