Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Carly Simon Available Now
Below you will see the bottom part of the stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.
Please note that the album you see pictured is not the record we are discussing here. It very well could have been been a Carly Simon album, or something from some other artist, but all we can say for sure is that it was definitely an album from the 70s on Elektra.
We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that avoiding these bad labels for the record in question would make it fairly easy to figure out what the better pressings of the album might be.
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own.
We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out the kind of information that makes it is easy to find the best pressings is where we have chosen to draw it. The top copies are the ones that pay the bills around here, and with a staff of ten, in California no less, the bills are sizable.
We appreciate your understanding.
What conclusions can we draw from this information?
The first one that comes to mind is that some vintage originals are poorly mastered and/or pressed. In the case of the PRC label pressings, the sound is “just awful. Tiny, thin, cardboardy. We had two of these, both bad.”
Now imagine that some company has come along and remastered the album on Heavy Vinyl for audiophiles and record lovers alike.
If the vintage pressing you own just happens to be on the PRC label — you picked it up years ago because it’s an original on the early label and appears to be as vintage as vintage can be — you would be jumping for joy that finally the sound of the master tape has been transferred to vinyl properly after all these years.
The originals suck! Thank god for Kevin Gray / Bernie Grundman / Krieg Wunderlich / Chris Bellman or somebody else — pick any name you like — for the wonderful mastering work they do, bringing old records back to life.
What a service they are doing for the audiophile community!
Their critics must be idiots.
Sample Sizes and One Man Bands
Those of us who play a variety of pressings of the same album know where judgments of this kind come from.
They are simply the result of sample sizes that are too small.
If you’re an audiophile reviewer operating as a one man band, which, as far as we know, is the only way any of them currently operate, your chances of getting it wrong are fairly high indeed. Here is one obvious example from a long time ago, but there are plenty more to be found under the heading of shootout malpractice right here on the blog.
Just as an aside, please note that many of our customers do their own shootouts and seem to be much better at it than any of the reviewers we’ve encountered. Perhaps we can take some small credit for showing them the way.
The winning stampers for this mystery album always come from the same pressing plant. That happens a lot in our world.
Figuring out which plants produced the best sounding pressings of the music we love has been the work of our company for three decades.
We are constantly learning new things, and we very much enjoy sharing that information with those who want to learn more about the mysteries of records.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
Further Reading