Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
Does anyone have a practical way to get around the unfortunate reality that allows one set of stampers to sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers to sound not much better than decent?
Well, we can’t say there is a practical way, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining that one for more than twenty years. We just play lots and lots of copies of albums to find out how they sound.
In the case of the record you see below, the copies with the best stampers and the copies with some of the worst stampers had the same stampers.
Here is the full stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.
Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did this particular shootout for.
We are not revealing what mystery title had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somewhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.
Our Approach
Having the wherewithal to do this difficult work puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for higher quality sound. Or, more accurately, that small subset of audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings who also have a great deal of disposable income to devote to such pressings.
Yes, we have the obvious resources that would be needed, the staff and the budget.
More important than either of those, we came up with a new (sort of) and much more successful (definitely) approach.
We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.
The impossibility of predicting the sound of individual pressings is one which we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I never had any difficulty wrapping my head around.
Early on in my audio career, sometime in the 80s, I realized it was in fact beyond dispute. (I owe a great deal to my friend Robert Pincus for showing me the light.) Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there are apparently a goodly number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it was simply a fact.
We take the simplest possible approach to the problem, one that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by experimentally-minded record collectors.
- Guess what pressings might be good for a given album.
- Buy some of those pressings and others like them.
- Clean them up, play them and see if your guess about the sound of the pressing turns out to be right, wrong or somewhere in-between.
- Repeat steps one through three until you chance upon a pressing that sounds dramatically better than all the others.
- Get hold of as many of those as you can and play them against each other under rigorously controlled conditions.
- Continue to make other guesses and acquire other pressings to play against the pressing you believe to be the best.
- Keep making improvements to your playback system and never stop testing as many alternate pressings as possible.
That’s it. Nothing to it. It all comes down to experimenting at a sufficiently large scale to achieve higher rates of success.
Further Reading