Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now
Weaver of Dreams is yet another Classic Records LP that’s hard to get excited about.
The notes I found attached to a copy in the backroom and played should be all you need to know to avoid the Classic pressing.
Shifted up (tonally) and hard.
Who wants a classic Columbia that sounds like that, especially one that was recorded in Columbia’s legendary Columbia 30th street studio recordings.
Years ago we wrote that Bernie Grundman’s work for Classic Records could be summed up in these four words. It seems that this Burrell record has some of those rather obvious shortcomings.
There are certainly some incredible sounding pressings of this album out there, but who has the resources it would take to find them?
Most of the early stereo 6-Eye pressings we come across these days turn out to have constant surface noise. Many have severely damaged inner grooves. Even the mintiest looking copies often turn out to be too noisy for most audiophiles.
This is of course why the hacks at Classic Records did so well for themselves — until they went under — hawking remastered versions of classic albums pressed on new, quieter vinyl.
If you want to hear this album with amazing fidelity but don’t want to spend the time, money and energy collecting, cleaning, and playing mostly mediocre copies until you luck into a good one, a Hot Stamper pressing is the only way to go.
That is, if you can find one on our site. We rarely have any stock of this album, for the reasons listed above.
We do have other Kenny Burrell albums, but even the records he made in the 70s are getting hard to find these days.
And if you are going to try to dig up your own top quality pressings, advanced record cleaning technologies are a must. Records pressed in the 60s are always in need of serious scrubbing, using the right fluids on the right machinery. Without the help of both of those, you have very little chance of success.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 at this stage of the game in 2025.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.
Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.
