Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now
As painful as it may be for us to admit it, sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be right!
For RCA classical and orchestral recordings, collectors have long held that the earliest pressings on the Shaded Dog label, in stereo, pressed in Indianapolis, tend to be the best sounding. That qualifier “tend” may not be necessary — plenty of audiophiles think they simply are better sounding, no question about it.
Maybe. If we tallied all the copies we’ve played and created a very large spreadsheet using the data, perhaps we could give you a better answer than “maybe,” but we’ve definitely never tallied them up and have no plans to do so. It sounds like a lot of work.
We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somwhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.
You can be sure, based on our most recent shootout for this mystery RCA title, that in future we will focus our efforts on the Indianapolis pressings and avoid the Richmond pressings unless they are cheap and minty.
When the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct, in other words, when it comports with reality, at least for the seven copies of this album that we played, we are happy to temporarily put aside our skepticism and learn from what this title is trying to tell us.
Why? Because the experimental evidence supports it.
The reality is that most of the time we are not able to predict which stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.
Although it’s true that there are many pressings in which one set of stampers always wins, the odds are greater that any particular pressing with those stampers may do well but won’t win, and it sometimes happens that some pressings with those stampers won’t do well at all.
This is why we have to do shootouts, and why you have to do them too, if finding the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.
I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are close to 200 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them, painful and costly as those experiences may have been.
When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we formerly made a point of revealing little of such information on the site, for a number of reasons we discussed in a commentary we wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution. (Ahem.)
However, in 2024 we decided to reverse that policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:
Please to enjoy.
Some information has been left out, the specific stamper numbers for our Shootout Winners for example, and in the cases where we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those stampers.
As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we bear, costs that must be passed on to our customers.
We are more than happy to give out some tips — plenty of them in fact.
However, if you really want to find the best sounding pressing of any given title, you have to do the same work we did, and that means buying, cleaning, playing and evaluating a big batch of pressings of the same album.
It may be expensive, it’s definitely a huge amount of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to do it.