Those of you who’ve watched the site over many years may know this, but it bears mentioning — it was rare for us to have Hot Stamper copies of Crime of the Century to offer our customers back in the early days of shootouts.
The first White Hot Stamper copy went up in 2008 and the next one didn’t go up for another three years. Even though we had learned what some of the best stampers for the album were, finding them in good shape turned out to be a lot harder than we thought it would be.
Here’s what we had to say about that state of affairs in 2008.
We actually attempted an all-day shootout late in 2007 that we had to abandon after every copy we played — without exception, mind you — either sounded bad or was too noisy to sell. We must have tried at least ten good-looking British pressings,only to come up empty-handed at the end of the day.
The Speakers Corner pressing beats the average original, I can tell you that without fear of contradiction.
Of course, all Speakers Corner copies are going to sound different — perhaps our review copy is one of the Hot ones.
By 2011 we had gained some perspective.
The bit about the Speakers Corner pressings sounding different has now been proven beyond any doubt. The copy we cracked open for one of our later shootouts didn’t sound nearly as good as the one we played in 2007.
UPDATE 2026
It’s important to remember that the stereo, our cleaning technologies, and, most importantly, even our ears were different 15 years ago.
And, during our formative shootout years, lots of audio progress was made, especially from 2007 to 2011.
2007 is when we discovered the 324p phono stage and the Prelude Record Cleaning System, and those two pretty much changed everything for us.
In 2007 we noted:
The early British pressings have a smoother midrange compared to practically anything else out there. You may have noticed that good British copies never make it to the site, and there’s a simple explanation for that.
Most early British copies (and later ones too) just do not sound good. On top of that, they are rarely quiet enough to play and enjoy. I can’t tell you how many British COTC pressings I’ve heard in the last 5 years that didn’t sound good or were noisy and groove damaged. But it’s a lot.
Well, things have certainly changed. The British copies do very well in our shootouts these days. Up until 2020, the right domestic pressings were sometimes winning shootouts.
Now we believe the Brits have the potential for the best sound. Here is a recent example that went for big bucks.
All it would take is for the right domestic pressing to win a shootout and we will be back to saying what is probably the best way to think about the album — both domestics and imports can sound amazingly good.
In 2026 I doubt any domestic pressing could win a shootout, but my mind is open to the possibility.
It all comes down to the copies you have on hand, how you go about cleaning them and how well you can play them.
Further Reading
- I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mobile Fidelity
- To find better sounding records, neglect your beautiful ideas
- Crime of the Century is a record that helped us dramatically improve our playback quality