Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now
What happens when all the stampers are A and B and every one of them is cut by Rudy Van Gelder?
This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the mystery Blue Note album whose stampers can be seen below.
It’s not Cornbread — those are really hard to find! We did a shootout last year and hope to have another one coming before long, but most of what we buy ends up going back to the seller for noise issues, so it may be a while before we can get it going.
In the meantime, whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Tone Poets reissue — it’s ridiculously bad.
What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?
The stamper numbers are no help.
And you can’t look for the VAN GELDER stamp in the deadwax since they all have it.
Of course, now that we’ve done the shootout, we know to buy the Liberty label pressings, but that could hardly have been predicted beforehand. Plenty of later labels beat the early label pressings on Blue Note’s albums.
But readers of this blog surely know that we are being facetious when we say we faced a lack of stamper information with the title above.
We have no way of knowing what the label is for any copy that is playing on our turntable, so how could the stamper information possibly matter, ever, under any circumstances?
We judge records by their sound quality, then grade them on that single metric, ignoring all others.
Only later do we learn which labels and stamper numbers correspond with which sonic grades, assuming they actually correspond at all. (Some don’t.)
If you are buying certain pressings because they have earlier labels, rather than pressings with later labels, predicated on the theory that the earlier labels should have better sound, this blog will be a godsend — because it will prove to you that the approach you are taking is not a particularly good one.
You are only fooling yourself if you think it is. It might work more often than not, but do you really want to be wrong about four records out of ten? Forty out of a hundred. Four hundred out of a thousand? With no way of knowing which group — good or bad — any given title happens to fall into?
A record collection of a thousand records is a decent sized collection. But with four hundred titles having second-rate or worse sound? Nobody wants that.
Buying originals is just not a good way to insure your collection will have top quality sound. Fortunately we know of a way that does.
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.
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 do not identify the title of the record with those stampers. As you can imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass 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 work we did, and that means buying, cleaning, playing and evaluating a big batch of pressings of the same album.
It’s expensive, it’s a huge amount of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to do it.
Further Reading