Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brewer and Shipley Available Now
UPDATE 2025
The commentary you see below was originally written about 15 years ago. Minor changes have since been made. At the time of this posting there is a copy of Down in L.A. on the site, one of the first copies we have had to sell since 2019, and before that I think our last shootout was in 2008.
There are a great many wonderful albums we can no longer offer our customers, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but I am glad to say that Down in L.A. is not one of them.
We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce: how the revolutions in audio of the last decade or two have profoundly changed the ability of the seriously dedicated audiophile to get records that never sounded good before to come to life musically in a way previously understood to be impossible.
This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as the commentary below explains.
60s Sound
The problem here is the sound. It’s got a bit of that tinny 60s pop production sound — too much upper midrange, not enough lower midrange and a slightly aggressive quality when things get loud. Still, it’s quite a bit better than recordings by, say, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane from the era, and I have no trouble playing and enjoying their records.
I can also tell you that if you have a modest system this record is just going to sound like crap.
How do I know that?
It sounded like crap for years in my system, even when I thought I had a good one.
Vinyl playback has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you’ve participated in some of the revolutionary changes that we talk about endlessly on this blog, you should hear some pretty respectable sound. Otherwise, I would pass.
On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, the kind of sound I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. The kind of systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.
If you’re a Weekend Warrior when it comes to your stereo, this is not the record for you.
If however you would like to advance in audio in order to hear better sound and enjoy more recordings than you do now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.
A Small Sample
Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems.
Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.
This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the listener, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process, especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles tend to neglect. More on this subject here.
Further Reading