More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better on the Right Reissue
There are three Epic labels for this record.
The originals are yellow, the first reissue is orange, and the last reissue is bluish black.
I can tell you that only one of those labels produced the best sounding copies in our shootout.
Beyond that you will have to buy a sample of each and do your own shootout. Finding clean copies was quite difficult; it took us a long time to get enough to play, and, as we said, most pressings are dreadful.
Those of you who like to read our commentaries and play along at home are going to have a rough time with this title. We sure did.
But the results are worth it, because we LOVE this music! Music just doesn’t get any better. If this album doesn’t lift your spirits, I can’t imagine what would. And note that many of the best songs here are exclusive to this greatest hits and cannot be found on any other album. That makes it a Must Own in our book.
One More Thing
We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom 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 specific approach will work for any specific title.
If you want better sounding records, opening your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressings will help you find them.
These reissues, for starters, and there are hundreds more on the blog you can read about here.
Two important points to keep in mind:
- Skeptical thinking is essential to any and all progress you hope to make.
- Pay no attention to the so-called experts. This is a subject we have written about a great deal.
It has been our experience going all the way back to 1995 that they almost never know what they are talking about.
Rarely do they offer much in the way of experimental evidence to back up what judgments they’ve made or conclusions they’ve arrived at.
Assuming they can even be bothered to approach the subject of pressing variations scientifically, due to the fact that they fail to use rigorous protocols in their shootouts.
If it somehow makes sense for record-collecting audiophiles to buy these modern pressings, how do you explain the hopelessly bad sound of the more than 300 we’ve auditioned over the last 30 years, as well as the failing grades given to those we’ve played more recently?