Month: March 2024

This Is Why We Love Rudy Van Gelder in the 60s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rudy Van Gelder Recordings Available Now

The top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1500 and, in our opinion, was worth every penny of that amount, being one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played

It probably took us ten years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort — what a record!

The notes on side one read: 

Track Two

  • Fingered plucky bass
  • Rich and spacious
  • Extending (high and low)
  • Horns are rich and breathy

Track One

  • Fat, rich bass and drums
  • So big and lively and no hardness

The notes on side two read: 

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Gorgeous Cover, Bad Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Felix Mendelssohn Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Our favorite recording of the work can be found here.

Awful sound. It’s bright, dry and flat, with strident strings.

The sound is much too unpleasant to be played on high quality modern equipment.

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way older systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up, bright and aggressive sound that is sure to bring it to life in no time.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an Old School system, you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and other audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you don’t know you’re missing.

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This Side Two of Highway 61 Revisited Was a Little Dry

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

This commentary was written about ten years ago.

This 360 Label pressing has a SUPERB A+++ SIDE ONE backed with a strong A++ side two. We had a big stack of 360s and Red Labels with good stampers to compare, and this copy had a side one that could not be beat. 

Side two has amazing clarity and transparency as well. Compared to side one it’s just a bit dry.

Those of you with tubey systems — vintage and otherwise — will probably go crazy for this sound. This was the best side two we heard this time around, but since side one was clearly more impressive we topped off the grade for the second side at A++.

The 360 label pressings are a mixed bag, running from mediocre to mindblowing; most of the time they are too trashed to even consider playing on an audiophile turntable.

Most of the later pressings are sterile, congested, and lean. [We no longer buy them or put them in shootouts.]

What separates the best copies from the also-rans is more than just rich, sweet, full-bodied sound. The best copies like this one make Dylan’s voice more palpable — he’s simply more of a solid, three-dimensional real presence between the speakers. You can hear the nuances of his delivery more clearly on a copy like this.

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Frank Sinatra – All The Way

More Frank Sinatra

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Seriously good sound throughout this vintage Stereo Capitol pressing, with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from start to finish
  • We all owe a debt of gratitude to the recording and mastering engineers from the era (50s and 60s) for the glorious sound they managed to achieve, a sound unequalled to this day
  • Side one is wonderfully big, rich and full-bodied, with the kind of Tubey Magic that allows Sinatra’s remarkably breathy baritone to work its magic on every phrase, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • This group of singles and B-sides was recorded from 1957 to 1960 – it contain some of Sinatra’s better known songs arranged by Nelson Riddle
  • As you can well imagine, finding clean 60s Sinatra records like this one, in stereo no less, is no walk in the park but marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, Tubey Magical sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Frank Sinatra singing live in your listening room. The better copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top (to keep the strings from becoming shrill) did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record! We know, we heard them all.

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Letter of the Week – “On some level they still hit my “real” button. Fancy reissues never do.”

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

Hey Tom,

The way I found you, even though our universes shouldn’t overlap much, is an interesting story that no one but you – at at least no one in my orbit – would understand, so you get to hear it.

I’ve been pissed at the sound of recorded music since CDs showed up to the party. The way I look at it, CDs didn’t start to sound decent until the 90s, and I spent the preceding years going from one latest and greatest to the next, to no avail. They all sounded the same to me.

At the time, and I think this is important, I kinda sorta moved to the view that, well, that must be what it really sounds like (thin, small, strident etc.) It was extremely frustrating.

Then DVDs showed up, and I’m a movie guy, and it wasn’t too long before I had to go the home theater route which means paying for at least 5 speakers and their corresponding amp channels, plus subs. So that took up several years, and it was fine since the video fills in the missing parts in your brain it would seem.

Although I had a turntable at the time, I never used it as it was an old Dual (sp?) of my father’s. But I started buying fancy-pants reissues anyway. The Classic LSCs and such.

I know what both orchestral and pop LSCs sound like. These didn’t, but I figured (this is so embarrassing) that, well, that must be what they really sound like. So I kept buying reissued vinyl, even though I wasn’t listening to them, because I knew one day I would.

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Little Feat / Time Loves A Hero

Little Feat Albums with Hot Stampers

Little Feat Albums We’ve Reviewed

  • Time Loves A Hero is back on the site for only the second time in years, here with seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades throughout this vintage pressing
  • Credit Donn Landee (and Ted Templeman too) with the rich, smooth, oh-so-analog sound found on the better sides
  • You get lovely extension up top, good weight down low, as well as remarkable transparency in the midrange, all qualities that were much less evident on the average copy we played
  • The blog has plenty of commentary on the Nautilus pressing, a record I admit to liking way back when, but no Hot Stamper would ever be as anemic and thin as that remastered record is, not when played back on the high-quality equipment we run today
  • “‘Old Folks Boogie’ beats anything on the last two albums…and “Rocket in My Pocket” is a Lowell George readymade like you didn’t think he had in him anymore.” – Robert Christgau

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We Were So Sure We Had The Pink Floyd’s Ticket, But We Were Wrong

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

In a reply to some questions Robert Brook asked about Revolver and Sticky Fingers — see here and here — I made mention of the advice, found on Hoffman’s forum and other sites, that is commonly offered regarding the superiority of specific pressings of albums discussed by those who post there and purport to know well.

This often-arcane advice includes labels, pressing plants, stamper numbers, specific mastering credits, etc. The practice is so common that audiophiles “in the know” are now expected to share their findings with other members for the benefit of all.

That’s the background for my comment below. I was explaining where I stood with respect to the recommendations I often read, in my typically undiplomatic language:

We do not respect the opinions of those who appear to have little understanding of records and their pressing variations. The faulty conclusions they invariably arrrive at lack evidentiary support because they don’t know how to do what we do and can’t be bothered to learn.

Regardless of what these folks believe, by now we’ve heard dozens and dozens of amazing originals [referring to Sticky Fingers]. This made us extremely skeptical that any other mastering house could compete with the right original’s sound. It was just too good.

Yes, we were skeptical, and it has turned out, at least so far, that we were right to be skeptical. Nothing has come close to the best early domestic pressings of Sticky Fingers, the ones that win shootouts and that we have long known to be the best pressings of the album.

But sometimes we are skeptical and we turn out to be wrong.

Specifically we were wrong about some albums by Pink Floyd (but not the title you see pictured). I wrote:

We’re not always correct about these things. We were dead wrong about a couple of famous Pink Floyd albums from the “wrong” country that we’d heard good things about.

They have been winning shootouts for many years now.

Our judgments concerning the best sounding pressings for any given title must be seen in the light of any information arrived at scientifically: it’s considered provisionally true. (We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.)

I felt it was important to point all this out. The impression I did not want to leave in the reader’s mind is that we know all the answers.

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Peter, Paul & Mary – A Song Will Rise

More Peter, Paul and Mary

More Folky Rock

  • A Song Will Rise is back on the site for only the second time in thirty-two months, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER throughout this early Gold Label stereo pressing
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be amazed at how big and rich the sound is
  • This copy is doing just about everything right – it’s clean, clear, dynamic and present with a lovely bottom end and lots of space around the instruments
  • Tubey Magic is key to the sound of the best pressings, and we guarantee our Gold Label originals have the kind of Tubey Magic that no modern pressing of the last 40 years has been able to offer the discriminating audiophile (with top quality playback)
  • “The fifth album, A Song Will Rise, appeared in March 1965. It was, in a sense, the last of a quartet of albums that made up the early Peter, Paul and Mary sound. Again employing two-acoustic-guitars-and-acoustic-bass instrumentation, it featured a combination of recent cover tunes, songs associated with the groups’ predecessors, such as the Weaver’s ‘Wasn’t That A Time,’ and a collection of revised traditional songs.”

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Even in the Quietest Moments – P & M Stampers Let Us Down This Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

After discovering killer Hot Stampers for this forgotten classic, we feel the album can hold its own with any of Supertramp’s 70s releases, from Crime of the Century all the way through to Breakfast in America.

The UK-pressed White Hot Stamper pressings from our recent shootouts showed us some of the best Supertramp sound we have ever heard on any of their albums, which is saying a lot. Supertramp is one of the most well-recorded bands in the history of pop music. Geoff Emerick took over most of the recording duties after the band decided to work with a different engineer for this, their 1977 album.

KEN SCOTT recorded the two albums that came before this one, Crime and Crisis, and as has been well documented on this very site, he knocked both of them out of the park.

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Ozzy Osbourne – Speak of the Devil

More Ozzy Osbourne

More Rock and Pop

  • Speak of the Devil returns to the site for only the second time ever with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on all FOUR sides of these vintage Jet pressings – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • “Speak of the Devil is strengthened by the classic combo of Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldridge on bass and drums, undoubtedly one of the best rhythm sections of Ozzy’s solo career.”

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