Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now
You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.
As you can well 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.
However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).
You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.
Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least five copies the way we did.
Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.
As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.
Changes for 2024
Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:
Here we identify the right countries — the ones that produced the best sounding pressings in shootouts — as well as the “wrong” ones for many of the albums we’ve auditioned.
Some of the titles listed here have better sound on labels that many record collectors would probably not expect to be the best. Other titles have inferior sound based on the labels we’ve identified in these listings.
Keep in mind that all the practical advice you see here is based solely on the experiments we’ve run and the data we’ve collected by doing them.
Helpful title-specific information on mastering houses and engineers to help you find better pressings and avoid the worst ones.
These are albums with polarity issues.
Some audiophiles have been known to complain that our reluctance to give out stamper information is selfish. We think that’s not fair.
We admit that we don’t give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that win shootouts — we paid a high price in money, time and effort to discover them — but we do give out some of the stampers of records that did not sound expecially good to us.
The moderately helpful title-specific advice here can help you in your search for better sounding pressings. At the very least it may help you avoid some of the worst ones.
Further Reading