Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now
We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:
Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live. This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.
But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.
One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.
The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it has passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophile. (More on our grading scale here.)
Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere.
Ambrosia
Although One Eighty is a very good album, I much prefer the band’s proggy first two releases, both of which fall into the broad category of Art Rock. That’s where you can find my favorite albums by Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music, Supertramp, 10cc, later-period Beatles, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and so many others from the last forty-plus years.
These artists’ recordings tend to be big, powerful and exceedingly hard to reproduce, which, probably more than anything else, accounts for my becoming a serious stereo enthusiast right out of my teens.
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that usually win our shootouts.
As of 2026, shootouts for this album should be carried out:
How else can you expect to hear this record at its best?
Based on our experience, the best sounding copies of One Eighty are found:
Further Reading