Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now
A hall of shame pressing if there ever was one.
The UK pressing of Roger the Engineer we played was pure crap.
Cool for collectors I suppose, but very bad news for audiophiles.
Your response to this news may depend on which camp you find yourself in. If you love collecting original pressings, we would put you in the record collector camp, not the audiophile one. Audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality, so if the more original pressing is the one you want, then you are a record collector first and an audiophile second, if at all. Harsh? Let’s call a spade a spade.
Regardless, we ask that you please not buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are always going to be the best sounding pressings. The hundreds of reissues listed here prove otherwise.
The original British pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a poor imitation of what was most likely on the master tape, as revealed by the Edsel reissues.
Maybe you have a good sounding one. We can’t say you don’t. But we would be very unlikely to spend much money on an original import pressing after hearing this one.
And the domestic records we’ve played were clearly made from dub tapes, so they’re a bust too.
How Did We Figure All of This Stuff Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none a week, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
Further Reading