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 other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long 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 had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.
Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*
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. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)
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:
*Collecting for the Sake of Collecting
It appears as though the vast majority of record loving audiophiles really like collecting records. If I had to guess, I would put the number in the range of 95%, perhaps even more. The five per cent that do not fall into that category are unlikely to want to spend their life savings on our pricey, not-especially-collectible pressings.
Our records have virtually no resale value. All their value is tied up in their sound.
We estimate that our potential pool of customers is less than one per cent of all the record-loving audiophiles who want better sound and can afford it. This is a fairly small cohort of possible customers from which to draw.
Thankfully, it is big enough to keep our business going and food on the table for the ten dedicated. music-loving men and women who actually do the work of supplying the world with Hot Stamper pressings. Nobody is getting rich, even at these prices, but we’re making a living and providing a service which people seem to really appreciate, at least that’s what they tell us.