Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
Recently we conducted a shootout for yet another superb Contemporary recording, one that we had auditioned a couple of times before, and one for which we had a good understanding of both the music and the quality of the sound. We’ve played vintage Contemporary pressings by the hundreds at this point. Rarely are we surprised by how good the right stampers and labels can sound.
It’s not the record you see pictured, however. For now, the title of this album will have to remain a mystery, along with a great many others we’ve been discussing on the blog recently.
The cost of discovering the right stampers for famous and often expensive records is often high, can take decades, and is fundamentally at the heart of how we make our money. We are in the business of finding potentially amazing sounding pressings. Often they have stampers we know to be good, and sometimes they have stampers we discover are even better.
We clean them up, play them, and offer to our customers those that, for whatever reasons no one has yet figured out — including us — are far better sounding than any others.
You’ll notice that the early Black Label pressings did the best in our shootout, followed by the later Green Label pressings, followed by the Yellow Label pressings with the earlier cover at 2+, which are in turn followed by the Yellow Label pressings in the later cover.
Depending on which D2 you’re playing, the sound could be absolutely amazing, or perhaps excellent, or, as in the case of the 1.5+ copies, merely good, not great.
Lessons Learned
Knowing the right stampers are D2 for this title does not allow us to predict which pressings will win a shootout. We actually have to sit down and play all the copies to come up with the hierarchy we laid out above.
However, knowing that the Black Label originals with D2 stampers are the copies most likely to win shootouts is very helpful information.
Think about it: No other pressings outside of the Black Label originals had even one Shootout Winning side.
That means we can afford to pay a premium price for clean original copies because they are very likely to win or come close to winning, and that’s where the money is in the world of Hot Stampers. The Triple Plus copies command a substantial premium over all others. Typically there aren’t many produced in a shootout, one or two. It’s rare for there to be more than that, although it does happen.
The Bottom Line
This is why every record we offer on the site has been through the shootout process, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in full, free of charge.
We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.
I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “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 make 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 our previous policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:
Please to enjoy.
If you really want to find the better sounding pressings of any given title, you will have to do the 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.
Further Reading