Month: February 2026

Great in Stereo, Bad in Mono. What Else Is New?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

On this record, we say stick with stereo.

This album is much more common in mono than stereo, but we found the sound of the mono pressing we played deeply unsatisfying.

Where is the wall to wall space of the live club?

It has been shrunken down into the area between the speakers.

Much of the ambience disappeared with it, destroying the illusion the album was trying to create, that you are actually there with Ramsey and his rhythm section.

In mono, you really aren’t.

For albums that actually can sound sound good in mono, so good they can win shootouts, click here.

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Graham Nash’s Wild Tales and Their Mysteries Many and Deep

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

What hurts so many pressings of this album is a generally lifeless quality and a lack of presence in the midrange.

Were the stampers a bit worn for those copies, or no good to start with, or was it bad vinyl that couldn’t hold the energy of the stamper, or perhaps some stampers just weren’t cut right?

Maybe it’s something as simple as the pressing plates going out of alignment at some point in the cycle?

Don’t ask us. We sure don’t know. And one thing we’ve learned over the years is not to pretend to.

These are record mysteries, and they are mysteries that will always be mysteries, if for no other reason than the number of production variables hopelessly intertwined at the moment of a pressing’s creation can never be teased apart no matter how smart you are.

As we never tire of saying, thinking is really not much help with regard to finding better sounding records.

Not surprisingly, we’ve found that cleaning and playing them seems to work fairly well.

Those two things work fairly well because nothing else works at all.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Rhythms of the South Revealed

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

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Ballet Music From The Opera – Yet Another Reissue that Trounces the Original

More of the Music of Saint-Saens

More of the Music of Mussorgsky

  • You will find superb sound throughout this vintage Victrola 60s reissue, one of the best in the entire series
  • Both of these sides are big, lively, and dynamic, with the lovely bells and other percussive elements benefitting immensely from the wonderfully extended top
  • The sonics here have the power to transport you completely, with solid imaging and a real sense of space, qualities that allow us to forget we are in our listening rooms and not in the concert hall

Pay attention to the brass — yes, it may have some tubey smear, but listen to how huge and powerful it is.

Drop the needle and watch (or listen) as the sound comes jumping out of your speakers.

Modern remastered records never do that.

These Decca-derived recordings are highly sought after, and with good reason. It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful audiophile disc, both in terms of the program and the quality of the sound.

This is the precisely the kind of big, bold, lifelike sound Decca engineers were able to capture on tape, and RCA mastering engineers were able to master from that analog tape, 60+ years ago.

The original RCA (LSC 2400) sells for many, many hundreds of dollars in clean condition and may not have especially good sound, if our experience is any guide. Some of the ones we’ve played have been quite shrill. In other words, you could easily spend a ton of money on one and end up with a bad sounding collector piece destined to sit on your shelf for years between playings.

Or you could buy the Classic 180g reissue and end up with one of the biggest disasters in the history of remastering. More about that later.

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Eric Dolphy – Out There in 2026

More Saxophone Jazz

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this vintage Prestige stereo recording pressed on OJC vinyl
  • This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical yet still super open and spacious
  • 5 stars: “A somber and unusual album by the standards of any style of music, Out There explores Dolphy’s vision in approaching the concept of tonality in a way few others – before, concurrent, or after – have ever envisioned.”

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Vienna 1908-1914 on Mercury Is No Better than Passable

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

The various pressings we played of Mercury SR 90316 were not awful sounding by any means, but they were not especially good sounding either.

The strings tended to be shrill on the copies we had on hand.

We felt it best to abandon our plans to do a shootout for it. We will probably end up selling our stock on Discogs.

The sound of some pressings of this album might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they are not worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

Many Mercury recordings suffer from shrill strings, and to be honest we have certainly heard much worse, but for the money we charge even the copies that might win a shootout would not represent a good value for our customers, not once we factor in the high cost of the records and the time it would take to clean and play them all.

If you see a copy for cheap and aren’t that particular about sound quality, by all means pick it up, assuming the music appeals to you.

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Nick of Time – Size Matters

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2010 after playing a killer Shootout Winning pressing that was so huge and powerful we just had to write about it.

We custom built a system that was especially good at, among other things, showing us just how big some pressings could get. Twenty years ago we wrote about it in a lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound.

If you have big speakers in a big room and like to compare pressings, you should have no trouble hearing the differences in size between pressings. Here are a number of other records that are good for testing ambience, size and space.

The sound here is POWERFULLY BIG AND BOLD, with meaty, deep bass (such a big part of the rockers here, Thing Called Love being a prime example) and some of the sweetest, richest, most ANALOG sound we’ve heard from any record Don Was was involved with.

When you hear it like this — something probably pretty close to what he heard during the control room playback for the final mix — it actually makes sense. It works. It’s not exactly “natural,” but natural is not what they were going for, now is it?

We play albums like this VERY LOUD. I’ve seen Bonnie Raitt live a number of times and although I can’t begin to get her to play as loud in my listening room as she did on stage, I can try. To do less is to do her music a profound disservice.

Size Matters

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is SIZE of the record’s presentation. So many copies of this album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. Some copies do; they create a huge soundfield with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. When you hear a copy that can do that, it’s an entirely different listening experience.

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Letter of the Week – “When I reached moderate hearing loss and faced the crossroads of giving up audio and my beloved music, by divine grace I serendipitously encountered Skeptical Audio.”

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better Loud Available Now

One of our best customers — and one of our nicest, as you will see — wrote to tell us of his hearing loss and what it has been like to discover Hot Stamper pressings so late in life. (Emphasis added.)

Hi Tom,

I am honored and surprised to have received an apology email directly from Tom Port, whom I respect for saving me from a religious world of preconceptions and labeling.

P.S. I dream of writing to you someday about music, equipment, cleaning, and other topics. For the past six months, I have been shooting out items purchased from Better Records, and although the number of shootouts is small, I am finally beginning to understand what you mean by a good press. I sincerely appreciate you showing me the truth of this world as an elderly person with little time left to live.

I can only thank God (the Source) that my encounter with Better Record came in time for the end of my life.

However, around the time I discovered Better Record, I began suffering from hearing loss.

Yet, even if I can’t catch the subtle nuances in detail, I’ve learned to judge sound quality by a simple method: whether I can immerse myself in the music or not.

Without exception, the records that allow immersion are Hot Stamper editions.

Your body sways, you never get bored, you listen to the entire side without preference, you turn up the volume even more—that’s what Tom is saying, right?

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Shostakovich / Cello Sonata / Shafran

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Shostakovich Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2004, before we started doing shootouts for records like this Living Stereo, LSC 2553, we had this to say about a copy we played.

Fabulous! A beautiful record!

These sell for a fortune now, so there is almost no chance we will be able to do a shootout for this album. If you see one at a good price, pick it up!

Performed by Daniel Shafran, Cellist, and Lydia Pecherskaya, Pianist. This performance also includes Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata.

Discogs Pricing Statistics

  • Lowest: $50.00
  • Median: $399.99
  • Highest: $1,000.00

1961 just happens to be one of the truly great years for top quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released that year.

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Listening in Depth to Heavy Weather

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Weather Report Available Now

Heavy Weather has some of the biggest, boldest sound we’ve ever heard.

It’s clearly a big speaker Demo Disc. Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it will sound.

The commentary below contains track-by-track advice on what to listen for when auditioning the album.

Side One

Birdland

Not an easy track to get right; there’s so much upper midrange and high frequency information to deal with. If the synthesizers and horns are too much, the effect is exciting but won’t wear well. Too much 6k is the problem on most copies, along with not enough above 10. That is a deadly combination.

A Remark You Made

Such an original composition. This is the band at their unconventional, uncommercial best.

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