Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased a while back:
Hey Tom,
You got me again. After hearing the Elton John record I was thoroughly pleased.
It realized what I was imagining when I read your description on the website. I can only imagine what the Super Hot Stamper LP would sound like as a White Hot Stamper.
Andrew S.
Andrew,
Glad you are enjoying that amazing pressing of Madman. We thought it sounded great too, and naturally that’s why we had so many nice things to say about it in our review. We discussed what separates the White Hot winners from the Super Hot second place finishers here:
You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic that exist on the best copies of Madman. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over the album.
The problem is that most British copies — the only ones that have any hope of sounding good in our experience — don’t have all the Tubey Magic that can be heard on the best copies. They are simply not as rich, tubey, and LUSH as the best that we’ve played.
This is the one quality that separates the winners of the shootout from the copies that came in second or third. Lushness isn’t the only thing to listen for of course. The rich copies can’t be too rich, to the point of being murky and muddy.
Achieving just the right balance of Tubey Magical Madman Sound with other qualities we prize such as space, clarity, transparency and presence is no mean feat.
It’s the rare copy that will do well in all these areas, and even our best Shootout Winning sides will have to compromise somewhere. There is always a balance to be struck between richness and clarity, with no copy able to show us the maximum amounts of both that we know are possible.
The DCC pressing has its own share of problems, which we talk a bit about here. No one with good equipment should be fooled into thinking that it is the solution to anyone’s problem.
Also, you may have seen this bit of commentary in other listings:
There are three amazing-sounding Elton John records on our Top 100 list, one of them engineered by the estimable Robin Geoffrey Cable, Trident Studios’ house engineer in 1972. His work on Elton John / Self-Titled and Tumbleweed Connection marks him as one of the All Time Greats in my book.
Madman Across the Water, the album to follow, seems to be a more difficult recording to master properly. That said, the best copies — we call them White Hot Stampers – are very nearly as good sounding as the two titles mentioned above.
Further Reading