On this Wonderful Sounding London, Is Ted Burkett’s 2G the Way to Go?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

Before we go any further, let me say that the record you see pictured is not the record whose shootout and stampers we are about to discuss.

Yes, that’s right, the stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping this title close to the vest.

What can we learn about the best sounding pressings of this vintage Decca recording, mastered by Mr. E and Mr. G, both outstanding mastering engineers?

It seems that Mr. G cut the better sounding pressing, our shootout winner as a matter of fact, but I can’t say whether the pressing that won was an original, since there were two differently-mastered Blueback pressings in the shootout, and one of them came in tied for last.

It was actually beaten by two copies of the Whiteback reissue. Those seem to be made from the same stampers as the winning pressing, but are those stampers the earliest or did they come later? Who knows?

Mr E. cut a version of the record that was quite a bit less impressive than most of the others, earning grades of 1.5 on side one and 2+ on side two.

Side one was dry and flat, side two rich but hard. We hear a lot of records with these shortcomings. If you play lots of classical music on vintage vinyl, you should be hearing them too.

And Your Point Is?

And what exactly does it mean to have learned experimentally what the best stampers for this album turn out to be, based on this shootout? How can we put this information to use in the future?

The next time around, some of the 2G copies with the Blueback cover might win (or come close to winning) the shootout, but other 2G copies might be very good, or not that good, depending on the pressing in hand.

This information may not be a big help to us — we have to individually grade every copy we play — but it’s not nothing either.

2G seems to be the trick, and that’s definitely worth knowing.

Unless

Unless you’re like most audiophiles and you have only one or at most two copies with those stampers. Then, unless your socks get completely blown off by one of them, you really don’t know whether you have a very good copy or a not so very good copy, because 2G comes both ways.

Record shootouts are tricky, but we here at Better Records can offer some advice based on the lessons we’ve learned after spending the last twenty years doing them for a living.

Skeptical thinking is essential to whatever progress you hope to make. Don’t listen to the so-called experts.

It has been my experience going all the way back to 1995 that they rarely know what they are talking about. Lots of conventional wisdom, with not much in the way of experimental evidence to back it up.

Why one set of stampers sounds so much better than another set is a mystery.

Does anyone have a practical way to get around the lamentable reality that allows one set of stampers to sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers to sound not much better than decent?

Well, we can’t say there is a practical way, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining that one for more than twenty years.

We just play lots and lots of copies of the albums to find out how they sound.

Our Approach

Having the wherewithal to do this difficult work puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for higher quality sound. Or, more accurately, that small subset of audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings who also have a great deal of disposable income to devote to such pressings.

Yes, we have the obvious resources that would be needed, the staff and the budget.

More important than either of those, we came up with a new (sort of) and much more successful (definitely) approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of individual pressings is one which we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I never had any difficulty wrapping my head around.

Early on in my audio career, sometime in the 80s, I realized it was in fact beyond dispute. (I owe a great deal to my friend Robert Pincus for showing me the light.) Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there are apparently a goodly number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it was simply a fact.

We take the simplest possible approach to the problem, one that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by experimentally-minded record collectors.

  1. Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
  2. Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
  3. Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
  4. Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds dramatically better than all the others.
  5. Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
  6. Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
  7. Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.

That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve higher rates of success.

Decca Mastering Engineers

  • A = Guy Fletcher
  • B = Ron Mason
  • C = Trevor Fletcher
  • D = Jack Law
  • E = Stan Goodall
  • F = Cyril Windebank
  • G = Ted Burkett
  • K = Tony Hawkins
  • L = George Bettyes
  • W = Harry Fisher

Further Reading

 

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