Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

We had a killer pressing many years ago that sounded a whole lot better than I ever thought the album could sound.

Man, what a revelation to hear an old favorite sound so amazingly spacious and sweet.

As good as the best Atco pressings can be, the early British pressings simply capture more of the Eric Clapton magic than they do. They are dramatically less gritty. Richer and sweeter too. (We’ve included some moderately helpful title-specific advice down below.)

I’ve been playing this album since I bought it in 1970, the year it came out. During my high school years (1970-1972, my rather limited record collection was made up of albums by The Beatles, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, America, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Chicago, James Taylor, Spirit, The Band, Loggins and Messina, Peter Frampton, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Blind Faith, Bread, and no doubt more than a few others that are lost to time.

This was the music of my youth, and although many other artists and styles of music have been added to the playlist in the ensuing decades, classic rock still makes up a substantial portion of the music I play and enjoy today.

This is no doubt the case for many of you. It’s why Classic Rock is the heart and soul of our business. Finding quiet, exceptionally good sounding pressings of Classic Rock albums is probably the hardest thing we do around here. It’s what we devote most of our resources to, and if we can be indulged a self-compliment, it’s what we do best.

Of course, having no competition to speak of is no little help in this regard. No one is even attempting to conduct the kind of record shootouts we find ourselves immersed in all week long.

And who can blame them? It’s hard to put together the layers and layers of resources necessary to pull it off. There are a great many steps a record must go through before it finds itself for sale on our site, and that means there are ten copies sitting in the backroom for every one that’s available for purchase.

If the goal is to move product, this is a very bad way to go about it.

Then again, our goal has never been to simply move more  and more vinyl, regardless of quality. We leave that job to the purveyors of modern mediocrities.

Our  goal is to find and make available to our customers the best sounding records in the world.

Those two things turn out to be very much at odds, but if you work at it long enough (37 years as of 2024) and hard enough (10+ people on staff who do nothing but buy, clean, play and review records), it can be done.

If you don’t believe me, just ask our customers.

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