Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now
Reasonably good bass, we’ll give it that, but no top end and no Tubey Magic.
More of Ron McMaster’s handiwork. The result is a record that simply has no reason to exist.
The AVERAGE original pressing sitting in your local record store bin right now for probably all of ten bucks will MURDER this piece of crap.
UPDATE 2025
It’s been a long time since anybody could buy a clean original of Gaucho for ten bucks! Fifty is the going price at our local stores these days. Worth every penny too.
As we noted for Ron’s remastered Band album:
When you see that little RM in the dead wax of one of these new Heavy Vinyl reissues, you know you’ve just flushed your money down the toilet. There should be a warning label on the jacket: Mastered by Ron McMaster.
It’s only a warning to those of us familiar with his work of course; the general public, and that includes the general audiophile public, probably won’t have much of a problem with the sound of this record, or anything else he does.
He still has the job, doesn’t he? What does that tell you?
Further Reading
There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are simply awful.
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how bad it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.
Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.
(But hold on just a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and record collecting in the Seventies.)
How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how mediocre-at-best these records sound.
Their equipment is not the issue. I suspect most audiophiles have perfectly good equipment. What some of these audiophiles have failed to ask themselves about the sound of their Heavy Vinyl records is, “compared to what?”
It’s the most important question in all of audio. And to answer it, audiophiles need to learn how to do shootouts. This means you.
Without shootouts, how can you begin to know the specific strengths and weaknesses of the sound of the pressings you own?
That’s where we come in. We are happy to help you find better sounding records using the methods we’ve developed over the last twenty years.
One of the best place to start is with this FAQ entry: How can I find my own Hot Stamper pressings?
Now, if you would like some evidence to support the idea that Hot Stamper pressings actually are better sounding records, before you spend all the time and effort it will take to find your own, we make it very easy for you to do just that. Simply go here and order anything you see.
We recommend you try a record you know well. It also helps if you have other pressings to play against our Hot Stamper. You have to hear the difference and see the value for yourself, on your stereo. You determine what the value of the record is, not me.
Hearing is believing. No explanations or descriptions can do justice to the sound of a truly great vinyl pressing played on high quality audiophile equipment. It is the thrill we all live for, and it never gets old.
Further Reading