Hot Stamper Living Stereo Classical and Orchestral Titles Available Now
Below you will see a section of the stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.
Keep in mind that, as usual, the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.
In the case of this mystery record, the 1s stamper was by far the best, with the Plum Label copies having later stampers (2s) earning a sub-Hot Stamper grade on side one.
The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, the kind of sound we consider to be no better than passable, We do offer records with 1+ grades as Hot Stamper pressings.
What would be the point? You can find them on your own. The world is full of mediocre records. They sit in the bins of every record store you walk into and make up the bulk of record collections of both audiophiles and music lovers alike.
How Come?
Since, as we discovered recently, 1s wins, and wins handily, why does 2s/3s do so much worse?
I could guess, but that would violate our policy against pretending to know what cannot be known.
Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)
Changes for 2024
Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:
Advice for which are the right countries and which are the wrong countries for specific albums we’ve auditioned.
Some of the titles listed here have better sound on labels that many record collectors would probably not expect to be the best. Other titles have inferior sound based on the labels we’ve identified in these listings.
Keep in mind that all the practical advice you see here is based solely on the experiments we’ve run and the data we’ve collected by doing them.
Helpful title-specific information on mastering houses and engineers to help you find better pressings and avoid the worst ones.
These are albums we have found to have polarity issues on some pressings.
Some audiophiles have been known to complain that our reluctance to give out stamper information is selfish. We think that’s not fair.
We admit that we rarely give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that win shootouts — we paid a high price in money, time and effort to discover them — but we regularly give out some of the stampers that did not sound expecially good to us.
Further Reading