Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now
Neither the sound nor the performance of this 1960 Living Stereo are impressive.
LSC 2287 might be passable on an old school system, but it was too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.
There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with similar shortcomings. Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down by label.
More of the Music of The B-52’s
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
Hey guys, before I talk about my very first Hot Stamper let me say this. I have been going to your site for well over two years and was very reluctant to spend the kind of money that you charge for a used record. Come on! Are you kidding??
But I was very intrigued by the description of your system. I had felt that the weakest part of my system may be the cartridge. So I sprung for the 17d3.
WOW! A first class improvement. So I thought “Well if these guys are right about the cartridge, maybe there is something about these used records. After all I can always send it back, right?”
So I ordered the B-52’s first album and played it. And played it. No No No, get up off your knees and stop begging. You can’t have it back. It’s MINE. Although I do not have this album in any format, it is now a reference or demo if you wish, that lets me know how good my system really is. It has also revealed to me that I have records that sound pretty darned good. It has also given me a lesson on critical listening.
I have been listening to music for over 55 years, and you are never too old to learn. Last week I received my new VPI with Disc Doctor package, and it seems to have been a wise addition. I have found a few treasures that have been lurking in my collection. And I ordered a Peter Gabriel today. I am a happy camper.
Kevin B.
Kevin,
Thanks for your letter. Now you have the ideal cartridge to play back our Hot Stampers pressings and hear just how phenomenally good they really sound.
Playback accuracy is at the heart of everything we do. We want to hear our records naked and unadorned. That’s what the 17dx does for us, and of course it can do the same for you.
More of the Music of The Pretenders
An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Half-Speed mastered audiophile LP reviewed and found wanting.
This pressing is completely lifeless. The brain trust at Nautilus managed to take all the rock out of this rock and roll band.
It’s yet another ridiculous joke played on a far-too-credulous audiophile public. If this Nautilus LP isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.
But look who’s talking? I bought plenty of Nautilus pressings in the ’70s and ’80s, some good ones, some not so good. And some of them I still liked well into the 2000s. What’s my excuse?
Even as recently as, say, fifteen years ago, I still had yet to achieve much of the progress in audio I would need to achieve in order to get past the last of the audiophile pressings I still clung to.
And there’s still one that just cannot be beat, even now.
Keep in mind I had been heavily into audiophile equipment and high quality records for thirty years at that point.
More of the Music of The Grateful Dead
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
Just got the Fresh Cream and Grateful Dead albums, cranked up the rig and they sound WONDERFUL, no surprise but LOTS of satisfaction! Thanks for your sale to enable this “poor” retired audiophile access to great sound.
Thanks for being such a unique person to have discovered what the audio world never really knew or appreciated or admitted to, and for making it available to others.
Best Regards,
EdZ
Ed,
It was our pleasure.
Thanks for your letter.
Best, TP
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now
Many years ago, more than 20 in fact!, a copy of this record was returned by one of my customers for poor sound quality, so I threw it back on the turntable to see if I had been mistaken in my judgement of its sound.
I confess that hearing the first track again, The Green Manalishi, was painful — it’s the worst sounding song on the album.
But then Oh Well starts up, and it’s full of midrange magic, ambience and exceptional transparency.
The sound varies from track to track after that, but if your stereo can’t find the magic on records like this, you seriously need to look into some better equipment.
This record sounds amazing on our system and it ought to at your house too.
The real test for a stereo is to get difficult to reproduce recordings to sound good, not easy to reproduce recordings.
If you want to test your system after doing some tweaking and tuning, these are the kinds of difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.
When these records start sounding better, there’s a good chance that whatever you did to your system to improve it actually worked.
And if you’re up for a challenge and want to buy some records that can sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.
This superb Living Stereo recording checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records.
Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it was somewhat crude and congested, and badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.
Well, now we know. The early Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we are offering here.
We never offered the record as a Hot Stamper pressing because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.
Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.
Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.
Did Harry have a good later pressing? Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did? We’ll never know.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums Available Now
Sonic Grade: F
An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing, recorded in 1956 and remastered, badly, in 1999.
The Speakers Corner version of this record is awful. It’s bright and GRAINY.
If you want a good Sarah Vaughan record, try the album just called Sarah Vaughan that Speakers Corner put out in 2004.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Kenneth Wilkinson
Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Kenneth Wilkinson
Wilkinson’s method of selecting recording venues was recounted in an article on concert hall orchestral sound written by the conductor Denis Vaughan in 1981:
I have recorded in many halls throughout Europe and America and have found that halls built mainly of brick, wood and soft plaster, which are usually older halls, always produce a good natural warm sound. Halls built with concrete and hard plaster seem to produce a thin hard sound and always a lack of warmth and bass. Consequently when looking for halls to record in I always avoid modern concrete structures.
Wilkinson went on to engineer at hundreds of recording sessions. He was said to have worked with more than 150 conductors. He was the engineer most responsible for Richard Itter’s Lyrita recordings (which Decca produced). Itter always requested Wilkinson as engineer, calling him “a wizard with mikes.”
Wilkinson’s stereo recordings with the conductor Charles Gerhardt (including a series of Reader’s Digest recordings and the RCA Classic Film Scores series) and the producer John Culshaw made his name and reputation known to record reviewers and audiophiles. His legacy was extended by the fact that he trained every Decca engineer from 1937 onwards.