Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dean Martin Available Now
We gave a couple of early pressings another chance and they blew it!
The copies we sell as Hot Stampers are the reissues from the 60s. Here is what we had to say about a copy we posted for sale recently:
With a voice that is relaxed, smooth and warm, Dino is the perfect guy to sing these songs.
The sound of this reissue is far better than any of the originals we played, which mostly weren’t very good. Which just goes to prove (once again) that in the world of vinyl, the idea that the original will have the best sound is a pernicious falsehood.
Rich, sweet, full of ambience, dead on correct tonality, and wonderfully breathy vocals – everything that we listen for in a great record is here.
To back that up with actual stamper sheet evidence, here are the grades for the two early pressings we put in our shootout. We’d heard the originals before and never liked them, but sometimes if a particular presssing is cheap and easy to find, we give it another chance.
I think we’re done with the originals now though. They’ve let us down too many times.
Who wants to hear Dean Martin’s gorgeous baritone sounding lean, dry and recessed, or, alternately, murky, nasal, grainy and veiled?
If I didn’t know better I would suspect these originals were modern reissues. This kind of crap sound is all over the Heavy Vinyl records we play, although nobody but us ever seems to notice.
The Point Is
This serves to make a very important point that is near and dear to our hearts:
The idea (and operational premise of most record collectors) that the originals are always better is just a load of bunk.
They might be and then again they might not be. If you want better sounding records, you had better open your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressings.
These, for starters, and there are hundreds more on the blog you can read about here.
Of course this is nothing but bad news for the average audiophile collector, who simply does not have the time or money to go through the hassle of buying, cleaning and playing every pressing he can get his hands on.
But good news for us, because we do.
We Do The Work
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.
If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.
Our Job Is to Find You Good Sounding Vinyl
That’s the reason we carry:
- Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one was done as a fluke a few years ago and since abandoned. The original plum label VICS pressings are the ones that win shootouts, not something pressed by Classic Records.)
- Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
- Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
- Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually, and another is in the works,)
If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers.
But they almost never do.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
