Our good customer Michel wrote to tell us — again — just how much he likes his Peter Gabriel Hot Stamper pressing of So.

I remember when I bought a 2+ copy of So. I had always thought that the UK’s would be the way to go, but even though I had a first press, ear fatigue set in quickly.

My US copy was not very good, so I wound up with the Classic gatefold … kind of cool packaging … so when I first listened to the 2+ I was besides myself, goosebumps and all.

Fast forward and I purchased a 2.5/2.5 Nearly White Hot Stamper copy. What a pleasure to be able to hear the improvement in the sound to yet another level. Bliss!

You guys have totally revolutionized my ears and my listening capabilities, which is utterly fantastic. Many thanks for that.

These days I don’t believe sh*t until my ears hear it, which is quite different than in the past.

Question … when you guys do shootouts for a particular LP, do you just compare the copies you have just procured, or do you have a +3/+3 house copy to compare to during your shootout?

What I like about the write-ups you do is it always gets me to thinking and going back to my LPs and relistening to them with my ‘new’ ears.

This process has been quite revealing.

Michel

Michel,

Thanks for your letter. As for your thinking that the Brit copies would be the way to go on So — and finding out otherwise — that’s precisely what happened to us about fifteen years ago:

We did a shootout many years ago that taught us a few things. The most surprising finding? The Brit copy I had in my own collection sucked — how about that! As a rule, I like the Brit pressings best for PG, but that rule got broken after playing all these domestic copies, some of which really sound good, clearly better than the Brits we had on hand.

Are rules made to be broken?

Yes they are.

This is a digital recording, and most of the time it is BRIGHT, SPITTY and GRAINY the way digital recordings tend to be, which plays right into the prejudices of most audiophiles for the “100% analog” approach they favor.

After hearing a bad copy, what audiophile wouldn’t conclude that all copies will have these bad qualities?

After all, it’s digital. It can’t be fixed simply by putting it on vinyl.

Ah, but that’s where logic breaks down. Proper mastering can ameliorate many if not most of a recording’s shortcomings. When we say Hot Stampers, we are talking about high-quality mastering doing exactly that.

But of course the mastering is only one part of the puzzle. I have multiple copies with the same stampers. Some of them are terrible, some of them are wonderful — you just can’t rely on the numbers to guide you with a piece of mass-produced plastic like this. You have no choice but to play the record to know what it sounds like. (And that’s a good thing. Keeps you honest. There’s no “cheating” when you have nothing to go by but the sound.)

The Classic Records pressing is at best mediocre — like most of the mid-fi junk they put out, we never bothered to write a review of it. We did manage to write more than 90, which means that as far as we’re concerned, we went beyond the call of duty and then some.

We did however happen to review the 2 LP 45 RPM Numbered Limited Edition that came out in 2016. We found it to be one of the worst sounding pressings of the album ever made. Of course it went right into our audiophile hall of shame with others of its ilk where it belonged.

As for the question of having a 3+ reference copy on the shelf to keep around for the next shootout, we have some, but not that many, probably less than a hundred.

Since we do more than a thousand different titles over the course of a decade, it would be nice to have more, but they aren’t really needed. It’s easy to hear when a record is doing everything right. When a record has one side that is not quite up to snuff, it’s the shootout that shows us in what area it may be lacking.

If any of you reading this want to get deeper into the sound of the album, perhaps in order to do your own shootout, the two tracks we test with on each side of So are described in detail here.

As for not believing what you haven’t heard with your own two ears, we’re with you all the way on that one.

The more skeptical you are of everything they tell you about audio and records, the more successful we think you will be.

Best, TP

---

Further Reading

• The curious task we have taken on with this blog
• Albums like So that sound better when made in the “wrong country”
• Robert Brook has lots of good advice for the dedicated analog audiophile