The short answer is that you can’t learn much from this shootout, because we’re not telling you which title the stampers you see below belong to.
Be that as it may, in the case of this mystery title the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — the earlier numbered pressings did better than the later numbered pressings, and the early labels did better than the later labels.
That happens a lot, and we are happy to admit that it does. Why? Because the experimental evidence — the data — say that is what happened.
As usual for posts in which the stamper sheet from a shootout is reproduced in its entirety, the stamper numbers shown below will belong to a different album than the one you see pictured.
These can be found under the heading of Mystery Stampers. Most of these posts will illustrate something to be learned from a Hot Stamper shootout, but because the information reveals the shootout winning stampers, the actual title of the record is rarely revealed.
Much more useful stamper information can be found using this link, which includes plenty of stamper numbers for specific titles that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound. In addition, we post the winning and losing stampers for some titles that are an unreliable guide to good sound. Unreliable stampers are also quite common.
The right stampers are only one of the many reasons some copies win our shootouts and others don’t, but in the case of this rare Mercury, a record that we only had four copies of, the RFR-2/2 stampers were clearly the best, with no other set of stampers coming close. The best of the others earned grades no better than 2+/2+.
One lesson that was clear was that the best stampers were, to quote our reviewer, “a step up!”
If we had had only three copies, none with the stampers that ended up winning — a too small sample size in this case — we would have most likely given up after finishing side one of the shootout and gone looking for more copies, especially other copies with different stampers.
We’ve played a lot of Janos Starker Mercury recordings, and we know how amazing they can sound. If we aren’t hearing that Demo Disc sound on the best of the side ones, we know we need to go to Ebay and Discogs and pay the hundreds of dollars it typically takes to find copies with the potential to blow our minds.
Another lesson that’s clear from this shootout is that once again the later label pressings are not nearly as good as the early label pressings.
Further Reading