Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now
You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.
As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.
But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings of CS 6101, Music of Berlioz, are the way to go.
It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.
It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.
Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.
No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.
No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.
When we first dropped the needle on a copy of this album, we heard the classic Decca Kenneth Wilkinson sound that we’ve come to know and love from the scores of other titles of his we’ve played.
At the time we would not have had any way to know how good the sound could get, or if it could get any better at all.
Knowing that only a shootout could tell us that, we proceeded to round up as many clean copies of the album as we could find and get one going.
The Question of the Day
Now imagine you are a record collector of the audiophile persuasion. (Notice we rarely use the term “audiophile record collector” if we can avoid it — it leaves a bad taste in our mouths and has since 1987 when we started our little record business.) Any of the copies you see graded above could have been the one you might have auditioned in order to “test” the record’s bona fides for sound, music, vinyl quality, etc.
Without a proper cleaning — something few record collectors are capable of in our opinion, and not something that one would typically do for a record one had just acquired — the sonic grade would drop between one half plus and one full plus.
So take the two worst sounding copies, the ones with grades of 2+/1.5+ or 1.5+/2+. .
Without the benefit of cleaning they are going to play closer to 1.5+/1+ or 1+/1.5+. Good, fine, but impressive? Hardly.
The conclusion you are most likely to draw? CS 6101 is a good record, not a great one.
But it is a great one! You just have to know how to clean your records right, and then you have to go through a pile of them in order to find the one that has the sound that Kenneth Wilkinson recorded and Harry Fisher mastered.
Let’s be honest. You are not going to do any of those things, certainly not for a record you barely know anything about, let alone one that has to reputation to speak of among record collectors in search of audiophile sound.
But we are, because we get paid to.
Knowing How Little You Know
Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you nowhere.
To find the best sounding pressings you have to clean and play a number of 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 top quality pressings — the ones that earn the 3+/3+ grades, not the 1.5/2+ grades.
They might all look the same, but they sure don’t sound the same. At least that’s what our customers tell us.
1959 — What a Year!
By the way, 1959 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings. As of 2025 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and seventy titles that were recorded or released in that year, and there are undoubtedly many more superb recordings from 1959 that we’ve yet to play.
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:
The right countries and the wrong countries for specific 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