Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now
If you have the Atlantic pressing, from any era, you have not yet begun to hear this record at its best. The better sounding domestic originals we’ve played are clearly mastered from copy tapes, which results in dubby sound.
In the Court of the Crimson King is such a well recorded album that even the sound quality derived from second-generation tapes is still better than most of what came out in 1969.
(By the way, 1969 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2026 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to play. To make it easier for audiophiles to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve also identified more than 25 Rock and Pop albums essential to any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.)
Now on to brass tacks.
UK Polydor Label
Passable, not really worth the labor to put them in a shootout just to have them earn sub-Hot Stamper grades. A1/B5 is a common stamper for these pressings and with those stampes the Polydor is not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.
Pink Label Island
The same can be said for some of the earliest UK Pink Label Island pressings. None of them has ever won a shootout and probably none of them ever will. (A number of Pink Label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)
The conventional wisdom which holds that original pressings are superior to reissues in this case turns out to be flat wrong.
The Pink Label pressings can be good, but we rarely buy them, our two best reasons being:
- They tend to be expensive in clean condition, and
- Their sound quality does not justify paying the premium price sellers typically ask.
We leave them to the record collectors who like to collect originals for the sake of collecting originals.
Blue/Orange Island Label
Every copy of the album with this label we’ve played was hopeless. Third (or more!) generation dubby sound, the kind that earns an NFG grade from those of us who know how good the record can sound.
Mobile Fidelity
The Mobile Fidelity pressing is surprisingly good, one of their best.
Rumor has it that they stopped making their version when Editions EG came out with a Half-Speed mastered pressing of their own, which, like most Editions EG records in our experience, sounds about as awful as any copy of the album can.
Based on our admittedly limited experience, anything with this label should be avoided.
We and our customers are audiophiles. We like to collect records with good sound. If we have our heads on straight, we don’t care what pressing we buy as long as it’s the one with the best sound.
Of course, not everybody agrees with us about that, but enough of you out there do, such that our business is sure to continue to prosper in the years to come.
In the Court of the Crimson King is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records: