Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:
Hi Tom,
What an incredible experience. I’ve never had anything close to an original of this one. Having heard some songs way too much on the radio didn’t help. I wound up with the AP 45, which compared to whatever I had, was better.
So I know in my head what the AP 45 sounds like. It’s basically all I know…. except that I know I don’t ‘feel Jim’s rage’ on any of the AP 45 LPs.
When I saw you guys had a copy, and it was a top notch one to boot, I was like, dude, you’ve gotta pull the trigger now without delay. What a terrific decision that was!
Raw, powerful, energetic, lively, warm, punchy, dynamic, begging for top volume, tonal qualities of Jim’s vocals absolutely perfect, effortless, you could turn it up to a thousand and it wouldn’t hurt your ears.
The drum kit sounds amazing as does the piano/organ and the bass. The placement of the instruments in the sound field is so easy to pick out. The transparency is phenomenal, everything in its right proportion, everything is maxed out yet since it’s all in proportion there’s nothing overshadowed by anything else. Everything in harmony. No distortion either.
This is a beautiful thing, mon ami, it truly is.
I can hear all this with my modest set up! I know I could go after ‘more’ but I am so happy with how things sound here that I’d really rather spend that money on really good sounding records that I love to listen to more than once or twice and actually appreciate and acknowledge the amazing sound experiences they provide.
I acknowledge that there is ‘more’, but at what cost? And really no guarantees.
Many thanks! This LP is really special in my house!
Michel
Michel,
Thanks so much for your letter. I can see by your enthusiastic writing that your experience of the album was nothing short of a revelation. The Doors can have that effect on you. Their records are a trip. I was collecting records for at least twenty years before I heard a copy of one of their albums sound the way your L.A. Woman sounds.
Most of the early reissues are a joke, and the later reissues are just ridiculously bad. I bought plenty of those before I learned my lesson and stuck with the early domestic pressings.
The notes may be a bit hard to read but if you can make them out you will see we had the same reaction to the sound of the album that you did. The best pressings have everything we’re looking for in a Classic Rock recording. Check it out:
Has anybody ever raved about a Heavy Vinyl pressing this way?
Is there any Heavy Vinyl pressing in the history of the world that sounds the way the notes for this copy say it sounds?
If you love your Heavy Vinyl pressing of L.A. Woman the way we and our customers love these killer Hot Stamper vintage pressings, please send us your notes. We’d like to read them.
Until then we are just going to have stand by our conviction that no one making records today can make records that sound like the vintage pressings we sell.
Glad to know your AP 45 sounds a lieless as you say it does. It means your stereo is showing how lacking it surely is. We have never played it, or any Doors album from that series, but the fact that it does not seem to be able to reproduce “Jim’s rage” would be a dealbreaker for us. We would probably give it an F.
I doubt you will ever be playing it again.
Although it is not a bad idea to listen to it carefully now that you have a good pressing to play.
You will be able to identify what modern records lack, and in time their faults will be as clear to you as they are to us.
Best, TP
Bruce Botnick, the engineer behind the boards for all their original albums, really knew what he was doing. If you would like to learn more, here are some links you might enjoy exploring.