Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now
The best domestic pressings we played, the ones cut by Robert Ludwig at Masterdisk, were simply not competitive with any of the early British LPs.
The evidence is pretty clear that the master tapes stayed in England and that only the British pressings are made from them. If you’ve played as many records as we have, it’s not hard to recognize dubby sound when you hear it.
As a general rule, this domestic pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the imported pressings we offer. Much like the records linked here:
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to be more compressed.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to have more smear.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.
We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.