Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of John Wesley Harding he purchased a while back:
Hey Tom,
So many great records in this batch, but some solid misses too — details coming. John Wesley Harding for example sounds great but has some serious distortion through much of side two; a bit ’too vintage’, in spite of the sound it seems once to have had.
Dear Sir,
Definitely check your front end setup on this one, there is no actual distortion on the record, just sound that may be hard to reproduce.
My advice would be to make sure you have replaced your cartridge recently.
Carts that get old have a problem with records like these. We know, we replace our cartridge every three months when hard-to-play records start to sound strained or congested and gritty.
The sheen of massed strings, a sound critical to the orchestral recordings we play, are impossible to reproduce correctly with an older-than-it-should-be unit. A fresh cartridge can make all the difference in the sound of difficult to reproduce records.
Keeping a cartridge installed for too long is a mistake made by 100% of the audiophiles I have ever known.
The other explanation could be that our microfine tip is playing deeper in the groove and missing whatever damage is encoded above it, damage which may have been caused by the older cartridges of the day that were used to play the record by the previous owner or owners. We can’t say it doesn’t happen.
We can say that if you bring this record back, the next person to buy it has a roughly 98% chance of keeping it. Maybe one out of five hundred or so ever come back a second time. At least that’s how it has worked out over the last twenty-five years.
Best, TP
P.S.
Want to find your own top quality copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
In our experience, JWH sounds better:
Which simply means that the 360 label domestic pressings win the shootouts, in this case without exception. I don’t think we bother with the Red Label pressings at all anymore.
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