Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now
One of our good customers wrote to us about his experience with a Hot Stamper pressing of Thriller.
Dear Tom and Fred,
I surprised myself by buying a White Hot Stamper of Thriller. It’s an album that struck me as a particular challenge to your business model. This is probably the most-pressed record in existence. A hot stamper has to be a needle in a really big haystack. And besides, how much better can they be, really? Isn’t any old copy of Thriller a pretty awesome-sounding record?
And, what’s more, why do I need an expensive copy of an album that I could happily live my entire life without ever hearing again?
But hey, I’ve returned records to you before, and you’ve never once tried to convince me to keep it, or given me any headaches about a return, so why not explore the limits of what your business can provide?
The first time I put it on, I could already tell it was special. It’s not like I was “hearing new details” or something like that. It’s that I was swept up, and able to relax and enjoy a stupendous album again. Listening to this copy of Thriller brought me as much joy as this music used to.
ab_ba
Dear ab_ba,
We’ve written about this experience before. If your current copy or some new audiophile pressing doesn’t bring you the joy of the music you remember feeling back in the day, it’s not the music’s fault. It’s the record’s. Or the stereo’s.
Aaron, you have taken your system to new heights. Your ears don’t work the way they used to. While you weren’t looking, the bar mysteriously reset itself. Now it’s much, much higher.
You’re simply a lot harder to please than you used to be. You have a much better understanding of how high is up, and up is a lot higher than it used to be, whether you like it or not. Good just isn’t good enough anymore.
And you will never be able to go back, even if you wanted to.
You could no more go back to those days than you could become a child again.
Welcome to my world, post 2007.
That’s why we tout Beatles albums as being critically important for testing and tweaking your system. We know they have the life of The Beatles’ music in their grooves, giving you the sound you remember falling in love with all those years ago.
If you’re not getting a thrill from your Beatles records, something is very, very wrong — precisely the reason their recorded oeuvre is a true audiophile wake up call.
Further Reading
Thanks for your responses and comments on my letter, Tom.
Regarding your point about the rising prices of clean copies of vintage records these days, I have a rule of thumb to share with your readers: If there’s a record you love enough to have purchased 4-5 copies, it’s time to buy a hot stamper. You’ll probably find it sounds better than the copies you found on your own, and doing this will help you avoid buying another 5 copies in a (potentially futile) attempt to find that one great copy, the one you actually listen to. Then, you can sell the ones that lost in a shootout to the hot stamper, and recoup a lot of your purchase price.
– Aaron