Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears Available Now
The commentary you see below was written around 2010.
In it we describe a mind-blowing pair of copies that were each awarded a grade of Four Pluses. There was one Four Plus side one, and another copy had a Four Plus side two.
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.
This was one of those records, a true outlier. Out of fifty records, this was one of the two copies that took the sound (and music!) of one of the sides to places we had never heard it go before. We call these kinds of records breakthrough pressings. When you get paid to critically audition records for decades, all day, every day, you are bound to run into some from time to time. These are their stories.
Our commentary from 2010 can be seen below. (Minor changes have been made.)
Our last big shootout was back in early 2008. What we learned this time around for this album can be summed up in a few short words: it’s all about the brass. Man, when the brass is right on this record, everything just seems to come together, top to bottom, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, the sound is almost always JUST RIGHT.
Let me give you just one example of how big a role the brass plays in our understanding of this recording. The best copies present a huge wall of sound that seems to extend beyond the outside edges of the speakers, as well as above them, by quite a significant amount. If you closed your eyes and drew a rectangle in the air marking the boundary of the soundscape, it would easily be 20 or 25% larger than the boundary of sound for the typically good sounding original pressing, the kind that might earn an A or A Plus rating.
The effect of this size differential is ENORMOUS. The power of the music ramps up beyond all understanding — how could this recording possibly be this good? You may need 50 copies to find one like this, which begs the question: why don’t the other 49 sound like this one? The sound of the amazing LP has to be on the master tape in some sense. Mastering no doubt contributes to the sound, but can it really be a factor of this magnitude? Our intuitions say no.
More likely it’s the mastering of the other copies that is one of the factors holding them back, along with worn stampers, bad vinyl, bad needles and all the rest. Any reason you like for why a record doesn’t sound good is as valid as any other, so you might as well pick one you are comfortable with; they’re all entirely meaningless. Of course the reverse of this is just as true: why a record sounds good is anyone’s guess, and a guess is all it can ever be.
Really, Is Four Pluses Enough?
After doing Hot Stamper shootouts for nigh on twenty years, it’s practically axiomatic with us here at Better Records that we will stumble on these “outlier” copies from time to time. Being so far outside the norm, they prove our case better than any amount of commentary can.
In most cases, if you know your records well, clean them right, have a reasonably good stereo and two fairly well-trained ears, you should be able to beat practically any Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile Remastering with four well-chosen copies.
Do You Really Need Fifty Copies?
The short answer this time around is Yes, you need fifty. We had one Four Plus Side One and one Four Plus side two, on two different copies obviously, and I would say we had pretty close to fifty copies in our data pool if you count the first round needle-drop rejects, of which there were probably thirty or more I would guess, with more than fifteen making the cut for the final rounds. Forty to fifty, that might be the best way to put it.
What’s Tasty About This Copy
Side one is one of the outliers we discuss above. We have an expression that we like to use for this kind of pressing — Master Tape Sound. When you drop the needle on a record this good, you feel like you just threaded up the master tape and hit play. The effect is that you’re so totally IMMERSED in the musical experience that you forget you’re listening to a record. You’re hearing the music exactly the way the musicians intended it to sound. You can’t ask for more than that.