Phenomenally Good Sounding White Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Dear Tom,

Yesterday I got to have an experience I’ll bet very few people – apart from you and your staff, of course – have ever had: a White Hot Stamper shootout!

My buddies David and Bill have amassed themselves quite a collection of Better Records, and among us, we now have multiple WHSs of the same titles. What an incredible bounty. Also, we’ve all copied your stereo, with Robert’s guidance and fine-tuning, to the best of our abilities. This allows us to do some dead-serious listening and comparing.

What did I learn? First, you are rock-solid reliable. A White Hot Stamper is a White Hot Stamper. They are all simply incredible sounding records.

Which leads me to rule #2: No two records sound the same. Yes, that even goes for white hot stampers. One copy will have better placement of the musicians; the other copy will have a richer tone. All white hot stampers sound fantastic, and also, they all sound subtly different. It’s just an amazing thing to hear for yourself.

Third, the stamper is only a part of the puzzle. The pressing is only a part of the puzzle. A few of the WHSs we own among us have the same stamper, but most of them did not. Sometimes, there was a family resemblance, like a country of origin. Also, we noticed that the majority of the WHSs we played were NOT original pressings.

It confirmed something we all learned at great expense: Chasing pressings and stampers recommended on the forums, or going based on rarity/price, is simply not a reliable guide to good sound. It lets you tell yourself you have a sought-after record, but it doesn’t allow you to conclude you have a great-sounding copy of that title. The guy on the forum might be right that his copy of that stamper sounds amazing, but that’s little guarantee the one you buy also will.

So, what’s my advice? If you’ve got a collection of hot stampers, do what I did, and invite over some buddies to listen. I’ll bet you’re going to find some people realize they just can’t go back to what they were listening to.

The second-best place to have a stack of Better Records is on your friend’s shelf.

Aaron

Aaron,

Naturally this all comes as music (ahem) to my ears.

Many years ago we noted that there are two ideas that we have found to be at the heart of building a high quality record collection.

One is to appreciate at the deepest level that no two records sound the same, which is something that every audiophile must come to learn through their own experience. You yourself have proven it once again by playing multiple White Hot Stamper pressings and noting the differences among them. It’s clear to you now, if it were ever in doubt, that even the best of the best copies of a given album do not sound exactly the same.

Instead, as you discovered, they all have strengths and weaknesses.

The strengths of any given copy must be in the most important areas of reproduction, such that the music does not suffer in any way. (Pressings of recordings that must have plenty of bass to sound their best cannot win shootouts without plenty of bass, etc.)

The weaknesses can be in areas that are not as critical to the music. (Soundstaging for some, three-dimensionality for others, etc.)

In other words, a record can win a shootout and earn our highest grade of 3 pluses with sound that is less than perfect.

Less than perfect is the nature of things. That cannot be the standard for judging a record — or anything else for that matter — in the real world.

If the music is working its magic, and the sound is so good you find it hard to fault — not impossible to fault, just hard to fault — and no other copy sounds as good, then 3+ is going to be the grade. Due to the law of “regression towards the mean,” the other side is unlikely to earn the full three pluses, although it does happen. On that other side it should be easy for the critical listener to hear what is not quite as good about the sound.

To aid our readers in their own efforts in doing shootouts, we have lately been publishing more of our notes that go into the details of what area is lacking. (After doing this kind of work full time for more than two decades, we are fairly sure that your notes should look like ours if you are listening as critically as we are. Regardless, as long as you are taking some kind of notes you are surely heading in the right direction.)

To do the kind of comparisons you carried out on the White Hots you played, you needed to have a high-quality, tonally-correct, revealing, powerful system, properly set up in a good sounding room.

I know you have such a thing because you own a lot of the same components we do, and, to take it to the next level, you had Robert Brook to help you get your setup dialed in to a “T”.

All of the above is what allows you to understand Axiom Number One (which really should be Number Two but that’s a story for another time).

This axiom holds that, in terms of sonics, the random copies you purchased of the modern remastered records you own will fall further and further behind their curated vintage vinyl counterparts the more truthful your playback becomes.

This is also something you know very well, along with:

• Reissues win plenty of shootouts. (I wouldn’t say a majority of the time, but often.)
• The most sought-after pressings, which are typically fairly expensive, are rarely the best sounding.
• Many of the best sounding pressings come from the “wrong” country, at least according to the conventional wisdom audiophiles have been taught and that most accept unquestioningly.
• The stampers are not dispositive, but represent only one link in a very long production chain. There are a great many steps that need to be taken into account, too many it seems, so this aspect of record making is either ignored or denied.

And I would add one that is especially true for the era we are currently suffering through:

• Mastering engineers with great reputations, including those whose work we have admired in the past, rarely make records that are much better than passable these days. (A pity, of course, and one that upsets the defenders of these mediocrities no end, but one that is child’s play to demonstrate on good equipment. To be clear, it’s child’s play for the child — or adult — that has a credit card and is willing to pay the price we charge for a Hot Stamper pressing.)

Congratulations on getting your hands dirty and doing the kind of work that, in my experience, not one person in a hundred who identifies as an audiophile can be bothered to do.

Or understands the importance of doing.

Or one that would even know how to go about doing in the first place.

Which is one of the main reasons for the existence of this blog, to point you in the right direction.

Most, I have found, like explaining why some particular pressing has to be the best without ever having done the work to find out whether it is or isn’t. Plato is not the ideal teacher. As author Nassim Taleb puts it:

“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning…”

The wisdom of that approach applies to both audio and record collecting.

If you know much about either, you will have no trouble recognizing another axiom that may someday join the first two:

• Higher quality audio and the pursuit of better sounding records are two sides of the same coin.

Thanks for writing,
Best, TP

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Further Reading

• Basic concepts every music lover should understand
• How can you tell when the conventional wisdom is wrong?
• Robert Brook has lots of good advice for dedicated audiophiles