Please Consider Taking Some of Our Hard-won Audio Advice

It is an unfortunate fact that, at least for some audiophiles, Hot Stampers simply do not exist.

They may be lovers of sound, the dictionary definition of an audiophile, but their systems are not revealing and accurate enough to allow them to hear how good a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned vintage (or maybe not so vintage) pressing can sound relative to whatever other version of the music they may have — Heavy Vinyl, cassette, CD, etc.

They simply do not possess a system (power, equipment, room, tweaks) of the quality required to play them at their best. 

Others won’t have developed the rudimentary listening skills needed to recognize the superior sound of a Hot Stamper pressing when it’s playing on their turntable.

Speculation? Opinion? Not really. Not when the evidence is this overwhelming. Let’s look at some of the facts.

A great many analog-oriented audiophiles are quite happy with the sound of Heavy Vinyl LPs, the kind that we regularly trash around here.

Those pressings set a decidedly low standard for sound quality, to our ears anyway, so if the typical audiophile is happy with them, what does that tell you about the quality of his audio chain and the nature of his critical listening skills?

It may be hard to wrap your head around this unfortunate and depressing fact, but many of the audiophile records being made today are even worse sounding than the audiophile pressings that were made back in the bad old days of the 70s, 80s and 90s. (Maybe the bad old days, like the poor, will always be with us.)

Boat Rocking

Our Hot Stampers will of course sound quite a bit better on even a run-of-the-mill audiophile system than practically any Heavy Vinyl pressing you care to name. But if you’re happy with a $30 reissue, what’s your incentive to spend five or ten or twenty times that amount based on nothing more than our say-so?

Even with a 100% Money Back Guarantee, why rock your own boat?

On the site we take great pains to make it clear that there are many ways that an audiophile — even a novice — can prove to himself that what we say about pressing variations is true, using records he already owns.

You don’t have to spend a dime to discover the reality underlying the concept of Hot Stampers.

We not only tell you how to go about finding them, we also help you to do a better job of playing them.

Have You Noticed?

But perhaps you may have noticed, as we have, that most audio skeptics rarely go out of their way to prove themselves wrong.

And a little something psychologists and cognitive scientists call confirmation bias practically guarantees that they won’t hear something they don’t want to hear.

Which is fine. At Better Records we don’t let that slow us down. Instead, we happily go about our business turning skeptics into believers (one record at a time of course), taking a few moments out to debunk the hell out of practically any audiophile LP we run into, for sport if for no other reason.

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