Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
All time world champ. A cut above unbelievable! All the magic sans the shrillness so common in the multitudinous copies I’ve heard. Breathtaking finesse and musicianship exploding in holographic dynamics that are clean and tonally real and penetrating.
What a copy. Pure gold. Thank you Tom. You knocked it out of the park.
Phil
Dear Phil,
Fantastic news. We loved it too.
A small correction, if I may:
Some mastering engineer knocked it out of the park. All we did was find the ball, grab it and run with it.
And if you want to find the killer pressing that can sail over the back wall with ease, possibly landing in the bed of a pickup truck never to be seen again, there is only one way we know of to do it: by turning over lots of rocks.
Some of the rocks we turned over for our first big shootout many years ago can be seen in the picture below.
It was taken in the early- to mid-2000s. By that time I had been buying up Sticky Fingers in local record stores for more than twenty years. I didn’t have much to show for my efforts, however, as the records were just too noisy, scratched-up, groove-distorted and just plain bad sounding to qualify for a shootout.
It wasn’t until 2007, with the discovery of the Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System and the Odyssey record cleaning machine (similar to Keith Monks’ design from the 70s that I used to use) that we were finally able to get Sticky Fingers to sound good enough and play quietly enough to identify the Hot Stamper pressings lurking in the pile of copies you see below.
Proof positive that there is nothing wrong with remastering vintage recordings if you know what you’re doing. These sessions from 1956 (left off of an album that Allmusic liked a whole lot less than this one) were remastered in 1985 and the sound — on the better copies mind you — is correct from top to bottom.