Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2026
The story goes like this:
In 2005 we acquired more than a dozen sealed copies of a popular Warner Bros. title, how I don’t remember. (For now we are keeping that title, and even the band that recorded it, a mystery. It might have been The Doobie Brothers, but then again, it might not.)
Our story goes like this:
Knowing that no two of these pressings would sound exactly the same, we decided to crack them open, clean them up and play them.
2005 was very early in the development of Hot Stamper Shootouts. By 2007 we were much better at them, and not coincidentally, that is also the year we decided that Heavy Vinyl pressings were just not good enough for us to bother selling.
All three of the major stamper prefixes for Warners were represented in the various matrix numbers: WW, JW and LW. As we started to play them it quickly became clear that most copies of this record just do not sound good. The typical copy is hard, midrangy, opaque, dull and lacks Tubey Magic.
Only one of those prefixes — WW, JW, LW — actually has any hope of sounding good, and surprisingly it’s not the one I would have expected it to be. Live and learn, right?
We liked either JW or WW back in 2005, I don’t remember which, and the subsequent evidence did not support that finding.
Live and learn is right, because since the dark days of 2005, we have done this shootout many times, at least five by my count, and it turns out that the stampers we tend to like are exactly the ones we tend to like in general for Warner Bros.
Here is a full sheet from a shootout we did not long ago that lays out the stampers we like for this mystery title: LW, with low numbers.
The WW (Winchester) stampers were lacking richness and depth.
the JW (Jacksonville) stampers were smeary and strained.
Only the LW (Los Angeles) pressings earned Super Hot (2+) or better grades. They have been winning our shootouts for years now, although LW-1 and LW-2 do more or less equally well, which simply means the winner of any given shootout is not predictable. Nowadays we would have many early stampers with LW prefixes and their grades would be all over the map, from 1.5+ on some sides to 3+ on others.
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