Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now
But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?
Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.
A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.
As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!
Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.
(And on Charade, 3s, for your information, is not a good stamper. It came in last in a recent shootout.)
We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely identify the best sounding pressing of any album. We never give out the shootout winning stampers except under the rarest of circumstances. (We give out plenty of stamper information, just not the stampers of the winners.)
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own. We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.
What did we learn from this shootout? Not much, but not nothing either. Indianapolis 3s/3s seems to be the way to go, as long as you buy and clean enough of them to find the one — yes, one! — with killer sound.
Since the 3s/3s pressing from Indianapolis wins, why do other copies with the same stampers, pressed at the same plant, do so much worse? 1.5+/2+? That is a long way from 3+/3+.
And no other copy earned a 3+ grade on any side, although, to be fair, three did come close.
And the same stampers, from the same pressing plant, but on the later label — Stereo (1964 on), not Living Stereo (1963, in this case) — are clearly a step down. Why is that?
Your guess is as good as mine.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but the music is weak. These are also titles you can safely avoid.
We also have an audiophile hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.
Further Reading
- New to the Blog? Start here
- Forget your theories, just get more data
- How can you tell when the conventional wisdom is wrong? (Or in this case, right?)
