Cleaning Records

The Four Pillars of Success – Hot Stamper Shootouts

The Four Pillars of Success

More entries in our Thinking About Hot Stampers series

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Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts with as many copies of the same title as you can get your hands on. There are basically four steps in this process and you have to achieve success with each of the four if you are going to be any good at discovering and evaluating your own Hot Stampers. 

We discuss each and every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this very site. Although none of it will come as news to anyone who has spent much time reading our stuff, we cobbled together this commentary to help formalize the process and hopefully make it easier to understand and follow.

If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly than most audiophiles and record collectors think is necessary.

The Four Cornerstones of Hot Stampers

That work is made up of these four steps. (more…)

Record Cleaning Advice

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Someone sits in this room all day, running the records through our proprietary multi-step cleaning process. Every Hot Stamper pressing has been vacuum cleaned on multiple machines using the Walker Enzyme system.

Walker Audio Prelude is the only fluid we recommend for serious SOUND ENHANCEMENT and cleaning of your LPs. You have never heard what’s really in the grooves of your records until you’ve cleaned them using Walker’s system. There is nothing in our experience that works as well.

We’ve also tried a number of “single step” record cleaning fluids and found that none were satisfactory. Disc Doctor is two steps, Walker is three (or four depending on whether you choose to use their new final rinse. At this time we do not). If you can’t see yourself using a three step cleaning process — no matter how much better it makes your records sound — then stick with Disc Doctor. For cheap records alcohol and water are fine. (more…)