Month: January 2026

Letter of the Week – “… even my 65 year old father, with no musical background at all, was amazed when I play your Beatles stampers.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I have enjoyed your records since I got a “Sgt. Peppers” hot stamper in 2011, and you guys have never disappointed me!

Every time I play one of the hot stampers for my musician friends, I don’t tell them “it’s a special pressing” but just play the record – they always comment on the sound quality, almost always saying “that’s so clear, so clean, etc…” – even my 65 year old father, with no musical background at all, was amazed when I play your Beatles stampers. He said, “in my time, records sounded scratchy and noisy.” What a revelation the Hot Stamper is.

(more…)

Al Stewart – Time Passages

More of the Music of Al Stewart

  • Amazing sound throughout this vintage British import, with both sides earning INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
  • The better sides have the kind of analog richness, warmth, and smoothness that make listening to records so involving
  • Standout tracks include “Song on the Radio” and “Time Passages” (an edited version of which made it all the way to #7 on the Pop charts)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…this is exceptionally well-crafted, from Stewart’s songs, where even three-minute songs seem like epics, to Alan Parsons’ cinematic arrangements and productions. [O]ne of Al Stewart’s very best albums.”

Our Hot Stampers of Year Of The Cat are always a big hit, and this, the 1978 follow-up, shares many of the same qualities. Alan Parsons is a pretty good producer and engineer it turns out.

This copy is richer and sweeter than most, with a big, bold, three-dimensional sound that perfectly suits the kind of Big Productions that are his stock in trade. The bigger the better we say!

Standout tracks include “Song on the Radio” and “Time Passages” (an edited version of which made it all the way to #7 on the Pop charts.) Both of these songs are more than six minutes long on the album.

(more…)

Winds In Hi-Fi / Fennell – Another Top Mercury, Formerly on the TAS List

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

  • An early Plum Label copy of this famous TAS list LP with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • This pressing boasts incredible sound from start to finish – Mercury knows how to capture the bite of the brass
  • Fennell is a master of this sort of sweet and lyrical Wind Music
  • Both sides of this spectacular Demo Disc recording are big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the Mercury sound we love, and that is so hard to find
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS list of Super Discs many years ago, but, like so many amazingly good recordings from the golden age, it no longer appears to qualify for inclusion.

Regardless of its current status with the writers at The Absolute Sound, a group whose taste and acumen must be considered questionable at best, the credit must go to Fennel along with the brilliant engineering team at Mercury. I’ve been told that he was a stickler for making sure everyone was perfectly in tune and playing correctly within the ensemble. That’s exactly what you hear when you play a record like this — it’s practically sonic perfection.

Fennell made a number of band music recordings for Mercury. My favorite is British Band Classics Vol. 2, which was the first Mercury recording I ever heard. I went out and bought a copy of it immediately from my local Tower Records on Golden Import.

Years later when I heard the real thing, and original pressing, I realized the Golden Import was a pretty second rate reissue, fine for the $3.99 I might have paid but a big step down from the early pressings.

Also, if you ever see a clean copy of Vol. 1, only available in Mono, pick it up. If it’s cut right it, too, is out of this world.

(more…)

On Our Top Copy, How Could We Tell that One Side Was Not as Full-Bodied?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Gordon Lightfoot Available Now

We described a recent Shootout Winning pressing of Summer Side of Life this way:

So transparent, open, and spacious that nuances and subtleties that escaped you before are now front and center.

Everything you want in the sound of a good Folk Rock album is here in abundance.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

Here are the notes for the 2.5+/3+ copy we put up on the site and sold in 2025.

Side two was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side two took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

(more…)

Nilsson’s Aerial Pandemonium Ballet Sounds Absolutely Awful

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Tracks from the first two Nilsson albums were turned into this monstrosity in 1971. Some were remixed, some parts rerecorded, but whatever they did, they really screwed up the sound of the finished LP.

I cannot even say that the remixing and rerecording and editing are not an improvement on the songs found on the first album — they may be, it’s not a record I know well. What I do know is that this compilation is so bad sounding it doesn’t matter what they did or how well they did it. The record is simply unplayable.

We’ve never done a shootout for the first album, but the second album we know can have wonderful sound on the right pressings. We described a recent Hot Stamper of the second album this way:

Both of these sides are big, clear and full-bodied throughout – if you are a Nilsson fan, this copy is guaranteed to beat anything you’ve heard before, and by a wide margin.

All of the elements are working here – you get silky vocals, punchy bass, breathy brass, silky highs, superb immediacy, remarkable clarity, and the list goes on.

AMG writes:

4 1/2 stars: “As ‘Good Old Desk’ opens Aerial Ballet with a cheerful saunter, it’s clear that Harry Nilsson decided to pick up where he left off with his debut, offering another round of effervescent, devilishly clever pop, equal parts lite psychedelia, pretty ballads, and music hall cabaret.”

All true! Nilsson is one of my favorite artists to this day, 56 years after I first heard the album “Harry,” which is still a personal favorite and one I listen to regularly, along with many others, including a compilation I think is excellent, Personal Best — The Harry Nilsson Anthology.

However, this compilation is shockingly bad — It’s cut loud, and it’s very hot and crude. Ouch is right.

(more…)

Weather Report – Heavy Weather

More of the Music of Weather Report

  • Both sides of this vintage copy have excellent sound for the band’s 1977 Masterpiece, earning top grades
  • “Birdland” on this pressing has some of the most dynamic, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, jam-packed sound ever committed to vinyl
  • Joe Zawinul and Jaco Pastorius are both here and at the absolute peak of their creative powers – this is a work of genius
  • 5 stars: “‘Birdland’ is a remarkable bit of record-making, a unified, ever-developing piece of music that evokes, without in any way imitating, a joyous evening on 52nd St. with a big band.”
  • We’ve compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with the accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Weather Report’s seventh (!) album is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know all that well but do well to find the time to get to know better.
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for Heavy Weather.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

The hottest of the hot stamper pressings demonstrate that this is a truly amazing recording, with some of the most dynamic, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling jam-packed sound ever committed to vinyl. The grit, grain and grunge of most pressings is nowhere to be found on these killer sides, and that alone puts them in a very special league indeed. (more…)

Frank Sinatra – The Concert Sinatra

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

  • Boasting two INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this copy is certainly as good as we have ever heard
  • Sinatra’s voice on this superb stereo pressing always sounds natural, even at its loudest – there is no strain or hardness, and that makes it a very special copy indeed
  • The 73 musicians you see stretched out across the soundstage at Samuel Goldwyn Studios behind Sinatra will give you some idea of the size and scope of the sound – with 24 mics feeding 8 tracks onto 35MM recording film, this was the sonic equivalent of Gone With the Wind
  • “It’s not exactly the swinging Sinatra of myth and legend, but it does make for a stunning musical experience; the Chairman is in great voice, and he scales the explosive orchestral peaks of Riddle’s arrangements with the confidence of a mountain climber on methedrine. His versions of “Ol’ Man River” and “Soliloquy” are big improvements over his Columbia-era attempts, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “My Heart Stood Still,” and “Lost in the Stars” are positively breathtaking.”

Folks, when we say that clean, good-sounding Sinatra records are hard to come by, we are not kidding. It took us five years to find enough copies of this title to do a proper shootout. In that time an awful lot of bad LPs passed through our hands: the monos (never heard a good one), the reissues (ditto), imports, and, most commonly, original stereo pressings in beat-to-death condition. People loved Sinatra and played his records until the grooves were gone.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “The whole house lights when up I turn this up all the way, emitting positive vibes into the universe…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing one of our records.

Hi Tom,

At 2 a.m. last night and again today, I simply cannot get over just how darn good the sound is on this 2.5 side 2
of the stereo Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section.

Truly, a magical experience indeed. The whole house lights up when I turn this copy up all the way, emitting positive vibes into the universe,
near and far.

All the other copies I had … no comparison at all.

One simply doesn’t know until one knows. That’s the crux of the biscuit as they say.

I sure do love my BR records!
Cheers,
Michel

Michel,

Thanks again for writing. I wish more audiophiles could have the kind of experience you apparently had with that killer copy of Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section you ordered.

As you say, your other copies could not hold a candle to the properly-cleaned, properly-mastered and properly-pressed copy we sent you.

And the Heavy Vinyl pressing that Chad and Bernie made is an insult to the record buying public.

(more…)

A Better Way to Get Rid of Grit and Grain on Jumpin’ Jive

More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain

Jumpin’ Jive is one of the clearest examples of an album where it is critically important to make sure your stereo is running on good electricity before you make any attempt to play it. This is the kind of recording — bright, full of energy — that will bring most stereo systems to their knees. Of course, when you play a good copy and it really sounds good, it’s a record that rewards all the time and effort you’ve put into your system.

So much of the aggressiveness, grit and grain that we hear in immediate, high-energy recordings such as this are really the fault of the electricity feeding the stereo, not the fault primarily of the record or even the equipment used to play it.

Now it should be noted that this recording has a ton of high frequency information that will be difficult to reproduce on most systems. If you leave a lot of appliances and electronic devices plugged in around the house when you listen to your stereo, you can forget ever hearing this record right. The grit and grunge caused by polluted electricity will make this record practically unlistenable, at the levels we listen at anyway. (At lower levels most of the garbage is masked, one reason no doubt that audiophiles rarely turn their stereos up to anything approaching live levels.) 

So do as we do: unplug everything you can get your hands on before you sit down to listen. Make sure your tubes (if you have tube equipment) are nice and warm too.

(more…)

For Audiophile Quality Sound on “Jaws,” You Might Want to Look Elsewhere

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

For good music? We will leave that judgment to you. Music is personal. What moves me in music and what moves you in music may be related but they are surely not identical.

In 1959 Eddie Lockjaw Davis & Shirley Scott recorded an album for Prestige and they called it “Jaws.”

The sound of the vintage pressing we played was not very good, with hard panning to the left and right. It was also dry and had too much reverb.

We were playing an early stereo copy, mastered by Van Gelder, but I honestly cannot remember the label.

Maybe the mono is better? It would not surprise me. If we see a mono pressing for cheap we will probably pick it up and give it a spin.

If you’re a fan of either of these two fine players, you might want to do the same. I believe we played the OJC pressing years ago and were not impressed, so best to skip that one too.

What we can say is that any album with sound as weak as the pressing we played leads us to believe that finding top quality sound is too unlikely for us to pursue the album further. Maybe at a bargain price, but vintage jazz records are rarely found for cheap these days. Best to move on.

(more…)