Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
UPDATE 2026
We used to buy the German pressings of Beatles’ albums like Help, but eventually we discovered that they were simply not competitive with the better Brits.
The lousy Brits, the ones sitting in the bins of your local record store or the ones you find in most BC-13 Beatles box sets, sure, the better German pressings beat those, but at some point many years ago we chanced upon some amazing sounding British pressings.
They forced us to reckon with the reality that even the best German pressings were very unlikely to reach the audio heights that the better British pressings showed us were possible.
Our commentary from 2011 follows.
We’ve heard some excellent German pressings before, but this time [circa 2011] nothing could touch our best Brit copies. What the best British copies have is more of the Tubey Magic that can typically be heard on early pressings, due no doubt to the fact that they are mastered with tube equipment.
One reason we were so crazy about the German pressings was how amazingly clean and clear they can be. I can’t tell you how many distorted Brit copies we’ve played of this album over the years.
Some of the old cutting equipment clearly adds its own layer of distortion to the distortion that already exists on the tape for many of these imports.
A clean, clear, super low distortion Brit copy like this one is certainly the exception and not the rule.
Much like we said about the Please Please Me Hot Stampers, on the top copies the presence of the vocals and guitars is so real it’s positively startling at times. Drop the needle on You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away and turn up the volume — on the best copies it will be as if John and Paul were right there in your living room.
The best import copies of this album sound AMAZING, but the typical one is pretty mediocre. Most tend to be dull, with not enough extension up top. It just goes to show that the only way to find out if a record sounds any good is by playing it. We don’t imagine many people have the extra hours to spend finding, cleaning, and playing multiple import copies of this record — so why not let us do the hard work and spend your free time ENJOYING this amazing album?
Further Reading