Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

Below you will see part of a stamper sheet that was generated for a shootout we did recently.

Please note that the album you see pictured — Cream’s Goodbye — is not the one we are discussing here. What it has in common with the mystery record we are writing about is both albums were made by British rock bands, both were recorded in England, and both sound their best on the pressings that were made in the UK.

For years we would buy any and all copies of this album on the early Polydor label as long as they looked original and had TML in the dead wax. The band was British, the production was British, but for some reason all the early pressings were mastered by The Mastering Lab right here in the states. Apparently somebody involved in the production thought they could do the best job, and they were probably right.

(The Mastering Lab was one of the great mastering houses in the 70s and 80s. There is no one alive today who can make a record remotely as good sounding as the ones they produced by the thousands in those days. If you know of any, please contact me at tom@better-records.com.)

Woops

Then we noticed that some of the Red Polydor pressings said “Made in Holland” on the label. We also noticed that the Holland pressings were never the winners of our shootouts.

It’s not as if they weren’t very good sounding pressings. They could earn grades of 2+ on both sides, as two of the seven copies shown below did, but most of the time their grades were a bit lower than those, and never as good as the best Brits.

Our appreciation of these facts, facts that had been staring us in the face for a decade or more, was lacking. We didn’t connect dots that were so obvious it was hard to miss them. Why I have no idea.

Eventually, after more shootouts had shown us again and again the limitations of the Dutch pressings, the penny dropped and we finally saw the labels for what they were: a clue to what pressings could win and what pressings couldn’t. Mind you: Every record still had to go through a shootout, and the person hearing and evaluating the record had no idea which of the two countries it might have been made in. But now we knew to pay a premium for the Brit-pressed records and only buy the Dutch at the right price.

Why did we keep at it until we had if figured out? Because we get paid to.

And if you make more money by doing something at the highest possible level, or at least a level higher than anybody else can do it, there is some chance you may succeed in doing better. For those reasons and many others, we may just be the world’s most knowledgeable experts when it comes to identifying the best sounding pressings of audiophile-quality recordings.

If we’re not I’d sure like to know who is, and how they came by their information. We’ve compiled volumes and volumes of data over the twenty years that we’ve been doing regular shootouts. Since shootouts are the only reliable way to gain replicatable information about the specifics of record pressings, and we’re the only ones who do this kind of work, there is no question as to who clearly has the most expertise.

But that doesn’t mean we know it all. If we come across that way, it’s the result no doubt of our enthusiastic responses to the hundreds of amazing records we’ve had the pleasure to hear. For example, here’s a good one, and of course there are literally hundreds and hundreds of others with similarly over-the-top notes.

One thing we do know: all knowledge, of records or anything else you care to name, is provisional. (Just the ability to recognize this fact is a big advantage over those who don’t understand the nature of scientific discovery.

Just to take one example: If somehow we did know it all, there would not be close to two hundred entries in our live and learn section.

How We Do It

We’ve learned what we think we know from the records we’ve played. Our record experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the rankings for all the records in between.

We’ve achieved our results by purposefully ignoring everything there is to know about a record — who made it, how they made it, when they made it — everything, that is, but the sound coming out of the speakers of our reference system.

In this case, once we had identified the best sounding pressings, we noticed they all said “Made In England” on the label. Voila!