Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now
What happens when all the stampers are RE-2?
This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the Jimmy Smith Verve album you see pictured to the left and whose stamper sheet is shown below.
What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings? The stamper numbers are no help. There were some markings in the dead wax for the 3+ copies that were different from the copies that earned lower grades, but they are hard to read and most sellers we buy from would struggle to identify them.
No, on this record there was really nothing to go by other than the sound.
From our shootout panel’s point of view, this is the only way it can possibly work.
Our listening guys never know what pressing is playing. We don’t tell them and they know better than to ask.
Only later do we learn which labels and stamper numbers correspond with the best and worst sonic grades (assuming they actually correspond at all. Some don’t.)
To see the other titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list we’ve compiled to date is short but not to worry, more are on their way.
Changes for 2024
Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve managed to discover over the last twenty years, under these headings:
Advice for which are the right countries and which are 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.
Here we provide the stamper information taken from one of our shootouts without identifying the title that those stampers belong to.
We admit that we rarely give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that actually win shootouts. We paid a high price in money, time and effort to discover them. The only way to recoup our investment is to sell the records that did well in our shootouts (for very high prices as you may have noticed).
These are albums we have found to have polarity issues on some pressings.
Here we mostly give out the stampers that did not sound expecially good to us, on good sounding titles and bad, as well as the stampers of titles that had all the same stampers, since keeping such information a secret would serve no purpose.
The moderately helpful title-specific advice presented 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