Hot Stamper Pressings of Exotica and Bachelor Pad Recordings Available Now
There are some records that, no matter how amazing the sound, and how good the music is, simply will not find favor with our customers. This is one of them. I happen to like the music, and the sound is shockingly good, a true Demo Disc for those of you with big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a spacious, heavily treated room like the one you see below.
We are most likely not going to be doing shootouts for this title in the future, so we thought we would share with everyone what we know about the record, which boils down to which stampers have the potential to do well and which do not.
As you can see, Stan Goodall did a much better job mastering the early Blueback London pressings for Decca than Jack Law.
What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?
The originals all have the same Blueback cover.
In this case, the stamper numbers are the only way to separate the potential winners from the sure losers.
| 11/2023 | Ros, Edmundo | Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) | early Blueback | 3 | 3 | 1E | 1E | other copies: 2.5/2, 2/2.5 | |
| 11/2023 | Ros, Edmundo | Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) | early Blueback | 1.5 | 1 | 2D | 2D | s1 dry, flat, trashy. s2 smeary, messy, boring | |
| RE ABOVE: | I FOUND THIS IN A BOX. | THOUGHT IT SOUNDED REALLY GREAT, ESP. | T1, S1 |
Jack Law’s cutting for side one was
- Dry
- Flat
- Trashy
and for side two it was
- Smeary
- Messy
- Boring
If you will excuse the cheap shot, that’s the sound we hear on many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve had the misfortune to play lately!
Stick with 1E/1E for the best sound, and use track one on side one to test whatever copies you pick up. In our opinion, it sounds “really great.”
To see the other titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list we’ve compiled to date is short but more are on their way.
Changes for 2024
Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve managed to discover over the last twenty years, under these headings:
Advice for which are the right countries and which are the wrong ones for many of the 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.
Here we provide the stamper information taken from one of our shootouts without identifying the title that those stampers belong to.
We admit that we rarely give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that actually win shootouts. We paid a high price in money, time and effort to discover them. The only way to recoup our investment is to sell the records that did well in our shootouts (for very high prices as you may have noticed).
These are albums we have found to have polarity issues on some pressings.
Here we mostly give out the stampers that did not sound expecially good to us, on good sounding titles and bad, as well as the stampers of titles that had all the same stampers, since keeping such information a secret would serve no purpose.
The moderately helpful title-specific advice presented 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.
