Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now
Mastered by Robert Ludwig. (Scroll down to find links to more of Robert Ludwig’s work.)
Digitally remastered using UV22 Super CD encoding by Apogee Electronics, Santa Monica, California.
This RTI 180g copy (with the zipper cover) is one of a series of five titles Bob Ludwig cut in the 90s. According to the man, after cutting the record he chanced upon a consumer copy and was shocked to hear how bad it sounded.
It sounded, according to him, nothing like the record he had cut. Somehow they had botched the pressings and ruined the sound. How this could happen I can’t imagine.
Bob says that’s what they did and we’ll take him at his word, out of respect for one of the all-time great mastering engineers, RL himself. He promptly sold off all his analog mastering equipment and got out of the game.
Can you blame him? According to him they put his name all over a record the sound of which they had ruined. Guess I would stop making records too if that were the case.
By the way, the sound was dismal on every title from that series we played except for Heart’s, which was okay, certainly better than the average pressing out there, but no Hot Stamper by any stretch of the imagination.
- Reviews of Hot Stamper pressings engineered by Robert Ludwig
- Hot Stamper pressings engineered by Robert Ludwig available now
- More commentaries and letters for albums engineered by Robert Ludwig
As a general rule, this pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage LPs we offer:
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to have more compression.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to have more smear.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
Back to 2000
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were often impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate or worse.
When I say worse, I know whereof I speak. Some audiophile records have pissed me off so badly I was motivated to create a special ring of hell for them.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.
