Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now
This is a highly unusual post for us here at Better Records, the first of its kind. We just did a shootout for Solomon’s Seal last week and here we are practically the very next day giving out the Shootout Winning stampers on the blog, and for free no less.
As you might have expected, we have a self-serving reason for revealing this information, and it should become obvious to you what that reason is by simply checking out the stamper sheet from the shootout shown below.
We often get requests from our readers to give out the “right” stampers, the “best” stampers, the stampers they should “look for.”
Well, readers, here you go. Have at ’em. Everything you need to know is right there on the sheet: the stampers, the grades, the engineer’s marks, even the grades for the not-recommended domestic pressings.
All the UK stampers are A4/B4 with PORKY/PECKO in the dead wax. (The early domestic pressings are decent, but they cannot begin to compete with the Brits for sound quality. You can safely avoid them unless you are on a strict budget and do not own very high quality equipment, or don’t care much for The Pentangle.)
As you can see from the grades, the best copy was killer, but a copy with the same stampers had sound that would not even qualify as a minimally Hot Stamper pressing. That’s quite a range, but it’s a range that we come across more often than many audiophiles might think would be the case.
If you have only one copy of the original British LP, where do you think yours would rank in terms of sound quality? Is it 3+, or 1+, or perhaps something in between?
(Chances are good it is something in between. Where in between, who can possibly say? That’s a question only a shootout can answer.)
And make special note of the fact the only one copy had even one Triple Plus Shootout Winning side. What would have happened if that one copy had not been part of the shootout?
Oh, this whole shootout business seems to be getting much too complicated much too quickly. Let’s just do what audiophiles have been doing for decades and ignore all these complications. Let’s pretend that the original Reprise British pressings with PORKY/PECKO stampers sound great and leave it at that. Anything else is just too much trouble, don’t you think?
It turns out that knowing the best stampers for Solomon’s Seal is no help at all. The best stampers and the worst stampers are the same stampers!
That’s not a problem for us. It’s how shootouts are done. Our listening panel never knows what pressing is playing, or what pressing is supposed to be the best.
They also know not to ask such silly questions. They’re there to find the answer, not be told ahead of time or reason their way to it.
Reasoning is what the Audiophile Reviewer Class likes to do. Here at Better Records we do experiments to get to the truth. Only one of those two methods will help you find better pressings, and if you know much about records, you know that reasoning plays almost no part in the process.
Changes for Better Records
Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve managed to discover over the last twenty years, under these headings:
Advice for which are the right countries and which are the wrong ones for many of the albums we’ve auditioned.
Some of the titles listed here have better sound on labels that many record collectors would probably not expect to be the best. Other titles have inferior sound based on the labels we’ve identified in these listings.
Keep in mind that all the practical advice you see here is based solely on the experiments we’ve run and the data we’ve collected by doing them.
Helpful title-specific information on mastering houses and engineers to help you find better pressings and avoid the worst ones.
Here we provide the stamper information taken from one of our shootouts without identifying the title that those stampers belong to.
We admit that we rarely give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that actually win shootouts. We paid a high price in money, time and effort to discover them. The only way to recoup our investment is to sell the records that did well in our shootouts (for very high prices as you may have noticed).
These are albums we have found to have polarity issues on some pressings.
Here we mostly give out the stampers that did not sound expecially good to us, on good sounding titles and bad, as well as the stampers of titles that had all the same stampers, since keeping such information a secret would serve no purpose.
The moderately helpful title-specific advice presented here can help you in your search for better sounding pressings. At the very least it may help you avoid some of the worst ones.
Further Reading