Month: December 2025

Listening in Depth to Blue

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with specific track by track advice to help you evaluate your copy of Blue.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

Our Overview

The better pressings (which tend to be the ones mastered by Bernie Grundman in his glory days) bring out the breathy quality to Joni’s voice, and she never sounds strained either. They are sweet and open, with good bass foundation and transparency throughout the frequency range.

The best pressings (and today’s better playback equipment) have revealed nuances in this recording — and of course the performances of all the players along with it — that made us fall in love with her music all over again. Of all the tough nuts to crack, this was the toughest, yet somehow copies emerged from our shootouts that made it easy to focus on the sonic merits of Blue and ignore its shortcomings.

Hot Stampers have a way of doing that. You forget it’s a record; it’s now just music. The right record and the right playback will bring Joni’s music to life in a way that you cannot imagine until you hear it.

That is our guarantee on Blue — better than you ever thought possible or your money back.

Side One

All I Want

This is a do-or-die song for side one. When Joni sings “traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling,” she really pushes on the last couple of them, and even the best copies have a hard time dealing with it. When a copy of this record comes in, that first line often tells me that there is no hope for side one.

If an LP can get through that first line properly, it’s at least a ‘B’ and more often than not a truly Hot Stamper.

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10cc – How Dare You!

More of the Music of 10cc

 

  • You’ll find stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides of this early UK pressing of 10cc’s fourth (and most wacky) album, just shy of our Shootout Winner – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This wonderful LP will show you that 10cc’s commitment to audiophile recording quality was as strong as any of the major artists of their day
  • Forget the dubby domestic stuff — this early British pressing is huge, spacious and rich, with prodigious amounts of bass, guaranteed to sound better than any other copy you’ve heard
  • 4 stars: “…a well-crafted album that shows off 10cc’s eccentric humor and pop smarts in equal measure… it remains a solid album of witty pop songs that will satisfy anyone with a yen for 10cc.”
  • If like us you’re a fan of Arty Rock from the era, this is a killer album from 1976 that belongs in your collection.

With this superb British pressing, some of you who might consider yourselves more devoted fans of the band will finally be able to hear what a good recording this is. The typical domestic copy is a disaster, as are some of the British originals and reissues; we should know, we cleaned them, played them and heard them for ourselves.

If you know anything about this band, you know their recordings are often amazing Demo Discs. We’ve done shootouts for all their most important titles and the sound on the best copies is OUT OF THIS WORLD.

If you’re looking for something off the beaten path, this is definitely one to check out. I don’t know of any other album like it.

Best sound on side one: “Lazy Ways.”

Best track on the album: “Rock ‘N Roll Lullaby.”

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Stanley Turrentine with Milt Jackson – Cherry

More of the Music of Stanley Turrentine

  • Incredible sound throughout this original CTI pressing, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Rudy Van Gelder really knocked this one out of the park – the sonics here are solid, punchy and present, just the way we like it
  • You will have a very hard time finding a better sounding funky Soul Jazz album than this copy of Cherry
  • “Stanley Turrentine’s husky tenor is a perfect match for Milt Jackson’s soulful vibes, and when Bob James’ masterful work on the Fender Rhodes is thrown into the mix we get a heady blend of soul-jazz, hard bop and the burgeoning funk-jazz sound all wrapped into one cohesive and very enjoyable record.” – The Jazz Record.com

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Pink Floyd – A Saucerful of Secrets

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

  • This vintage UK stereo pressing was doing just about everything right, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them
  • Forget whatever sleep-inducing Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of these wonderful sessions from 1967 (some with Syd, some with David), this is the only way to go (particularly on this side one)
  • Bernie Grundman remastered the mono tapes for a Record Store Day release, and if you want to know why we have lost all respect for Bernie, you can go to the blog and read our review on his work in painful detail
  • In 2014, Nick Mason named A Saucerful of Secrets as his favorite of Pink Floyd’s studio albums. “I think there are ideas contained there that we have continued to use all the way through our career,” he says. “I think [it] was a quite good way of marking Syd [Barrett]’s departure and Dave [Gilmour]’s arrival. It’s rather nice to have it on one record, where you get both things. It’s a cross-fade rather than a cut.”

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How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on an Album?

More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Carrying out a carefully controlled shootout with a large number of cleaned pressings is precisely what teaches you what to listen for on an album.

One way to think about it is this: you can’t know what to listen for until you start listening.

If you’re playing enough of copies, and your playback quality is good enough, the records themselves will tell you what they are capable of. All you have to do is listen to what the best of them are doing.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

    1. First you go deep into the sound.
    2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
    3. Now, with the knowledge of what to listen for, you are in a position to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right, and you do it often enough, it has the power to change everything you will ever understand about audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes clear what they “did to it” in the mastering. Compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound, it’s obvious how far short of the mark it falls.

The critiques we write nowadays are usually quite specific about the shortcomings of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some testimonial letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are limiting yourself to buying vintage records, not remastered pressings, you are probably not wasting much of your money.

That’s because every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered more than a stopgap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally get hold of a better sounding vintage pressing in good playing condition.

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Acoustic Sounds Hired Doug Sax to Ruin a Classic Chet Baker Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Trumpet

The less said about this awful mid-90s Doug Sax remastering for Analogue Productions the better. What a murky piece of crap it was.

Audiophile reviewers may have been impressed, but even way back then we knew a bad sounding record when we played one, and that pressing was very bad indeed.

One further note: the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today, twenty-five thirty-one years later, have a similar suite of shortcomings, sounding every bit as bad if not worse, and fooling the same audiophile reviewers and their followers to this very day.

Nothing has changed, other than we have come along to offer the discriminating audiophile an alternative to the muddy messes these labels have been churning out for decades.

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Buffalo Springfield – Retrospective

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this original Atco pressing will be very hard to beat
  • Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the better pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment (particularly on this side two)
  • “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are just two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments (particularly “I Am A Child” on this side two)
  • And the Pysch stuff – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – is guaranteed to be more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard it
  • 5 stars on AllMusic – this is Must Own Music from one of the most groundbreaking and accomplished groups of the late-60s (even though they never cracked the Top 40 Album chart)

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West Side Story – How Does the DCC Pressing Stack Up?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the excellent DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

If you happen to own the DCC vinyl, buy the CD and find out for yourself if it doesn’t have better sound.

The vinyl will most likely be thick, opaque, airless and tonally too smooth.

That is the sound their records tended to have back in those days, and at the time I bought into that mastering approach.

Over the course of the next decade I learned how foolish I had been to fall for that kind of euphonic EQ.

The better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered vinyl releases will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

And Kevin Gray, his partner in crime, has been making a mockery of the audiophile LP for decades now.

Testing with Oscar

We write quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

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The Nautilus Half-Speed of Harvest Is Not Bad!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

We haven’t played a copy of this record in more than a decade [make that two], but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to see things differently now. 

In the early 2000s we wrote the following (please excuse the all-caps, I could barely type back then):

This is a SURPRISINGLY good sounding Nautilus Half-Speed mastered LP with AMAZING transparency.

The sound here is DRAMATICALLY more natural than your average audiophile pressing. Just listen to the phony top end found on most MoFis to see what we mean.

On this record you’ll hear none of the hyped-up highs that are MoFi’s claim to fame.

This Nautilus is sure to destroy the typical domestic pressing, which (before cleaning) will tend to sound opaque, thick and dull.

This Half-Speed wouldn’t really match up to our Hottest Stampers, but you could sure do a lot worse.

Although it’s a tad fat at the bottom, it still retains much of the warmth and richness found on the best copies.

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Robert Brook Knows a Better Way to Do Analog – Part Two

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that his blog is:

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble attempt to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love hearing music reproduced with the highest fidelity and are willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

There’s a BETTER WAY to do ANALOG – Part 2


Further Reading