Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Red Garland Available Now
A rare and expensive (!) early stereo pressing that we played in a recent shootout for Bright and Breezy was passable at best.
As you can see from the notes reproduced below, we found the sound to be “sweet, relaxed, but badly veiled and lacking weight and bass.” (Note that records without a 1.5+ grade or better on both sides are not considered Hot Stamper pressings.)
In other words, it sounded too much like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them. (For this album, clearly the best sound is found on the right OJC.)
Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might boast all the latest and most expensive components.
Which brings us to an assumption that many audiophiles make, especially those who spend time on forums whose members dispense advice about which pressings are most likely to have the best sound. We find such advice to be so often mistaken as to be almost worthless.
We lay out our thinking on the subject by asking this question: Are Hot Stampers just original pressings?
To make our case, here is just a small sampling of the records we’ve played with the potential to sound better on the specific reissue pressings we’ve discovered, in direct head to head comparisons (we call them shootouts) against the best originals.
We also have a healthy supply of amazing sounding reissues available should you wish to purchase pressings that beat the originals — any originals — and we back up that claim with a money back guarantee.
Here’s How We See Our Job
Our job is to find you good sounding pressings.
That’s the reason we carry:
- Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one is the only one that comes to mind.)
- Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
- Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
- Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually,)
If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers.
But they almost never do.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
Further Reading
- Record collecting for audiophiles from A to Z
- Some stereos make it difficult to find top quality pressings
- Stop doing these things and you too can find better sounding LPs
