Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now
This is a highly unusual post for us here at Better Records. We just did our first ever shootout for Solomon’s Seal last week and here we are giving out the Shootout Winning stampers, and for free no less.
Go ahead, do your own shootout. Everything you need to know is right here.
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.
If you have one copy of the original British LP, where do you think yours ranks? Is it 3+, or 1+, or something in between?
(Chances are good it is something in between.)
On this title I’m afraid there is really nothing to go by other than the sound. Turns out knowing the best stampers is no help at all. The best stampers and the worst stampers are the same stampers!
Our listening guys never know what pressing is playing, or what pressing is supposed to be the best. They know not to ask. We want to find the answer, not be told ahead of time or reason our 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 these methods can reliably help you find better pressings.
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
- Basic concepts every record lover should understand
- When you’re just getting started in audio, it all looks so easy
- Doing your own shootouts is one of the best ways to train your ears