Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now
In our experience, the Gold Label stereo originals with 1B/1B stampers are terrible sounding.
With 1B stampers it’s bad enough to go into our hall of shame for vintage pressings.
(Bad sounding audiophile records, being so plentiful, especially these days, have their own hall of shame.)
No surprise there; it’s just another bad sounding original pressing that ended up doing poorly in one of our shootouts.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.
If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.
Here’s How We See Our Job
Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.
That’s the reason we carry:
- Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one was done as a fluke a few years ago and since abandoned. The original plum label VICS pressings are the ones that win shootouts, not something pressed by Classic Records.)
- Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
- Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
- Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually, and another is in the works,)
If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers.
But they almost never do.
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