Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
This is a Beatles album we think we know well.
We’ve done a number of shootouts for A Collection of Beatles Oldies over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the sound of the originals vis-a-vis the reissues:
- The best of the early pressings always win our shootouts. No reissue has ever earned our top grade of A+++ and it is unlikely any reissue ever will.
- The reissues can be quite good however. The best of them have earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
- The worst of the early pressings also earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
- Conclusion: if you have a bad original and a good reissue, you might be fooled into thinking the sound quality was comparable.
The stamper being the same for both the originals on Yellow and Black and the reissues on the later label is also not helpful. It’s possible you might see Ted Burkett’s 1G on both pressings and hear what you think you should hear, the kind of confirmation bias that our shootouts are designed to eliminate.
5.) This kind of mistake is often partly the result of having a small sample size, aided no doubt by improper cleaning and less-than-the highest-fidelity playback. The law of large numbers may also be instructive here.
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that have been winning our shootouts for many years. As of 2026, shootouts for this album should be carried out:
Based on our extensive experience, A Collection of Oldies has the potential to sound its best:
We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom wherein we attempted to make the case that, although the most common record collecting approaches are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know when any given approach will work for any given title.
In this case the conventional wisdom turns out to be right.
For The Beatles it is one of the exceptions to the rule that their albums sound better on the right reissues, rarely on the originals. (More on that subject here.)
Here are a couple of more takes on this album:
And we are proud to offer the discriminating (and well-healed) audiophile the best sounding Beatles albums ever made. We’ve written a great deal about them over the course of the last twenty years, but none of that really matters. Once you’ve heard one, we suspect you will become a believer like so many of our other customers.
