More Label Advice for Audiophiles
There are a lot of Green Label Warner Bros. records from the 60s and 70s that sound dark, murky, recessed and so on.
The shortcomings we list below are hardly exhaustive but they should help you make a good start. Click on any link to see the pressings we have identified with that specific problem.
But the later label LPs are rarely any better and more often than not much, much worse. When you play most of them, it’s obvious that their mastering engineers have gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inappropriate and more often than not disastrous.
But don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of good ones. On this blog we’ve taken the time to identify the Green Label Warner Bros. records with the potential to win shootouts. (Potential is the key word in that sentence.)
Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity may not be easy, but for most Warner Bros. albums it can be done. It’s what we get paid to do, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same thing at home as long as you make sure to follow our approach.
That Old Record Sound
The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.
The average record we play tends to suffer from some of these faults. It might be:
Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that were stamped out over the last seven decades with no concern for sound quality.
Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless — relatively speaking of course — the average record will show itself to be.
Average records don’t sound like our amazingly good shootout winning copies, but they look just like them, and that’s what makes finding them so difficult. For classical and orchestral music, the effort required must be seen as the work of a lifetime.
Changes for 2024
When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing little of such information on the site, for a number of reasons we discussed in a commentary we wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution. (Ahem.)
However, in 2024 we decided to reverse our previous policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:
Some information has been left out, the specific stamper numbers for our Shootout Winners for example, and in the cases where we give out the stampers for the top copies, we do not identify the title of the record with those stampers. As you can imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.
We are more than happy to give out some tips — plenty of them in fact.
However, if you really want to find the best sounding pressing of any given title, you have to do the work we did, and that means buying, cleaning, playing and evaluating a big batch of pressings of the same album.
It’s expensive, it’s a huge amount of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to do it.
Further Reading