*Basic Concepts

Here are a group of commentaries illustrating the concepts we’ve found to be helpful in understanding and evaluating the sound quality of recordings.

How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on an Album?

More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Carrying out a carefully controlled shootout with a large number of cleaned pressings is precisely what teaches you what to listen for on an album.

One way to think about it is this: you can’t know what to listen for until you start listening.

If you’re playing enough of copies, and your playback quality is good enough, the records themselves will tell you what they are capable of. All you have to do is listen to what the best of them are doing.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

    1. First you go deep into the sound.
    2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
    3. Now, with the knowledge of what to listen for, you are in a position to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right, and you do it often enough, it has the power to change everything you will ever understand about audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes clear what they “did to it” in the mastering. Compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound, it’s obvious how far short of the mark it falls.

The critiques we write nowadays are usually quite specific about the shortcomings of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some testimonial letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are limiting yourself to buying vintage records, not remastered pressings, you are probably not wasting much of your money.

That’s because every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered more than a stopgap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally get hold of a better sounding vintage pressing in good playing condition.

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Here Are the Shootout Winning Stampers for SR 90435

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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An Empirical Approach to Finding Better Records

More Basic Concepts and Realities Explained 

Some approaches to this audio hobby tend to produce better results than others. When your thinking about audio and records does not comport with reality, you are much less likely to achieve the improvements you seek.

Without a good stereo, it is hard to find better records. Without better records, it is hard to improve your stereo.

You need both, and thinking about them the right way, using the results of carefully run experiments — not feelings, opinions, theories, received wisdom or dogma — is surely the best way to acquire better sound.

An empirically-based approach to audio will surely result in notable improvements to the quality of your playback.

This will in turn make the job of recognizing high quality pressings — the ones you find for yourself, or the ones we find for you — much, much easier.

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Two Approaches to Finding Better Records (and One of Them Actually Works!)

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

If you want to believe the press releases, the hype, the liner notes, the reviews (which are rarely more than the worst kind of malpractice in our opinion) and all the rest of it, that’s your business.

Good luck with that approach; you’re going to need it. When you reach the dead end that more than likely awaits you, come see us.

After 35 38 years in the record business there is a good chance we will still be around.

Our approach, on the other hand, revolves around cleaning and playing as many records as we can get our hands on, and then judging them on their merits and nothing but their merits, calling them as we see them as best we can, without fear or favor.

Our judgments may turn out to be wrong. Tomorrow we may find a better sounding pressing than the one we sell you today. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.

We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended that we did. All knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.

If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section.

We regularly learn from our mistakes and we hope you do too.

But we learn things from the records we play not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the ranking for all the records in-between.

We’ve learned to ignore everything but the sound of the records we’ve actually played on our reference system.

What, of value, could anyone possibly tell us about a record that we’ve played for ourselves?

This approach allows us to offer a unique, and, to our way of thinking, uniquely valuable service to the discriminating audiophile. When you’re tired of wasting your time and money on the ubiquitous mediocrities that populate the major audiophile dealers’ sites and take up far too much space in your local record store, let us show you just how much more real handpicked-top-quality-recordings can do for your musical enjoyment.

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Letter of the Week – “Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

One of our erstwhile customers asked me a question not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

Some audiophile guy professes to me that he prefers his Japan and German pressings of Dire Straits’ 1st LP over the UK press. How can I tell him in a kind way that he is wrong?

Dear Sir,

You can’t, in a kind way or any other way.

You have to play the two pressings for him, on his stereo or yours, and that’s simply not possible unless he lives near you, which is rarely the case, audiophiles being fairly thin on the ground in my experience.

Explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

All forums — whatever their benefits — cannot overcome this problem.

Next time someone posts an opinion about a record, ask yourself “What does his system sound like?”

If you don’t know the answer, why on earth would you put any stock in his opinion? For all you know his system sucks and his critical listening skills are non-existent. He might have a pair of JBL 100s in the basement and a Dual turntable (or the modern equivalent of same).

He may hate the records whose sound you love and love the records whose sound you hate.

I Look Forward to Being Proven Wrong

Along those lines, I had a new customer tell me that this record was one of the better Heavy Vinyl reissues he had heard recently. Rather than just paint every Heavy Vinyl pressing with the broad brush of disgust I normally reach for when doing reviews for them, I thought maybe I should actually give this one a listen.

It might change my mind. It might help me see the light. Maybe I could even learn a thing or two instead of being so relentlessly negative about modern reissues. They can’t all be as bad as I say, can they?

So I took his advice and ordered one right then and there.

For thirty bucks, I learned a lesson worth a great deal more than the money I sunk into such a worthless piece of vinyl on the say-so of someone whose stereo I had never heard, which is this: never believe a word you read about audio or records, no matter who says it, or where you read it, except under very specific circumstances.

What circumstances, exactly?

To my mind there is only one circumstance when it makes sense to believe what somebody — anybody — tells you about the sound of a record: If that advice comes with a 100% money back guarantee of the purchase price if you are not happy with the sound.

It can’t get any more simple than that, now can it?

Do any of these guys ever put their money where their mouths are? Not a one of them ever has to the best of my knowledge, and why would they? Plenty of downside, but not a trace of upside. To quote Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther from Victim of Love, “I could be wrong, but I’m not.”

Of course we do things very differently here at Better Records. Yes, we have strong opinions. Lots of them.

But we back those opinions up with a full money back guarantee. The upside for us is huge — a satisfied customer, our favorite kind — and the downside is practically nil — whatever record someone returns just goes back up on the site, sells to someone else and we never see it again.

Voila, another satisfied customer!

I don’t know how Chad Kassem would react to you trying to return his awful Stand Up or his mediocre-at-best Tea for the Tillerman, but I doubt he would take too kindly to the idea.

And speaking of not being wrong, we actually go out of way to point out when we are.

Better to be a scout rather than a warrior.

There are way too many warriors on audiophile forums as it is, don’t you think?

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Frames of Reference, Carefully Conducted Shootouts and Critical Listening

Hot Stamper Pressings of Decca Recordings Available Now

The sound we were hearing on this pressing of the Beethoven Septet (CS 6132) during a recent shootout was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments heard in the work.

The legendary 1959 Decca tree microphone setup had worked its magic once again.

And, as good as it was, we were surprised to discover that side two was actually even better!

The sound was more spacious and more transparent. We asked ourselves, how is this even possible?

Hard to believe, but side two had the sound that was TRULY hard to fault.

This is precisely what careful shootouts and critical listening are all about.

Shootouts are the only way to answer the most important question in all of audio: “compared to what?”

Without shootouts, how can you begin to know what are the strengths and weaknesses of the copies you own?

The vast majority of our Shootout Winning pressings fall short in one way or another on one side, something we have lately been making more of an effort to highlight on the blog.

Now, if you are a fan in general of modern Heavy Vinyl pressings, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings of those same titles could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl might sound fine.

It’s only when you have something better to play that its faults come into clearer focus.

And if you have any of these titles and they sound fine to you, this is a situation that requires your immediate attention!

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To Find Out How Much Sound You’re Missing, Consider a Different Approach

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

We explain — for free! — how anyone can find better records here.

If you want to know what you’re missing, there is only one approach that allows you to do that.

It involves two things that have made the modern world what it is today:

  1. Empirical findings based on the use of
  2. The scientific method.

Any other approach is doomed, not to failure, but to findings that are neither reliable nor repeatable.

To our knowledge, we are the only record dealers who use rigorously controlled, empirically proven testing procedures to make judgments about the sound quality of the pressings we audition.

That one fact, more than all the others combined — our playback quality, our philosophy, our decades of experience, our skilled listening panels — explains why we are able to offer the discriminating audiophile dramatically better sounding vinyl pressings than anyone else.

As a result of this scientific approach, the exceptional sound quality of the records we sell make it clear to audiophiles exactly what they’ve been missing. (Many have written us enthusiastic letters about sound they could hardly believe.)

Or, put another way, we make clear to them that they did not need to settle for the second- and third-rate sound quality of the Heavy Vinyl pressings they’d been buying because they didn’t know something better was available. (Many have written us letters of the shock they experienced when comparing our Hot Stampers to their audiophile pressings.)

We Didn’t Know Either

We didn’t know how amazingly good so many records could sound until about twenty years ago ourselves.

We found out starting in 2004 when we began doing shootouts.

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons.

The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and noting the differences we heard made us better listeners.

We took our critical listening skills and applied them to tweaking and tuning our stereo and room in order to get as many colorations and limitations out of them as possible.

Through all this work we came to have a better understanding of the fundamentals of collecting better sounding records.

However, without a staff of ten finding, cleaning and playing records, it is the rare audiophile who should expect to be able to duplicate our results.

But they can certainly do a lot better using our approach than any other, an approach that is guaranteed to put them well ahead of all the audiophile reviewers and forum posters in the world combined.

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Critical Listening Vs. Listening for Enjoyment

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals

In order to do the work we do, our approach to audio has to be fundamentally different from that of the audiophile who listens mostly for enjoyment.

Critical listening and listening for enjoyment go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing.

The first of these — developing and applying your critical listening skills — allows you to achieve good audio and find the best pressings of the music you love.

(Developing critical thinking skills when it comes to records and equipment is important too but that is not the focus of today’s commentary.)

Once you have a good stereo and a good record to play on it, your enjoyment of recorded music should increase dramatically. A great sounding record on a killer system is a thrill.

A Heavy Vinyl mediocrity, played back on what passes for so many audiophile systems these days — regardless of cost — is, to these ears, an insufferable bore. (And, judging by what we’ve played in 2024 and 2025, these remastered releases are sounding as bad as they ever have.)

If this sounds arrogant and elitist, so be it. Heavy Vinyl records are fine for some people, but for the last twenty or so years we’ve managed to set a higher standard for ourselves and our customers. Holding our records to that higher standard allows us to price our Hot Stamper pressings commensurate with their superior sound and please the hell out of the people who buy them.

For those who appreciate the difference, and have resources sufficient to afford them, the cost is reasonable. If it were not, we would have gone out of business long ago.

Hot Stampers are not cheap. If the price could not be justified by the better sound quality and quieter surfaces, who in his right mind would buy them? We can’t really be fooling that many audiophiles, can we?

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Hearing Is Believing

More Advice on Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

Below you will find some ideas on becoming an expert listener from back in our early shootout days. Those shootouts, like this one, are the very thing that taught me how to improve my underdeveloped listening skills in the first place.

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written in 2006, about two years after we started putting Hot Stampers on our website. This classic release by Cat Stevens took the honors of being the first, and deservedly so. It is one of the all time greats. Sometimes we even have one in stock.

Many of the commentaries from our old site have been transferred to the blog you are reading.  This is one of the earliest ones that we’d written, one we credit with getting the ball rolling for the concept of Hot Stampers and the practices required to find them.

(For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how one might go about acquiring them.)

For years we’ve been writing commentaries about the sound of specific records we’ve auditioned. We described their exceptional attributes in detail in order to put them up for sale at admittedly high prices.

By now there are literally hundreds of pages of commentary in which we’ve tried to explain exactly what we listened for and exactly what we heard when playing these pressings. We’ve tried to be as clear as possible about which qualities separate the better sounding LPs from their competitors — what they were doing right, and how we learned to recognize those qualities.

As we’ve gained a better understanding of records and their playback, we’ve made every effort to share with our readers what we’ve learned. (This link will take you to some insights we gained from shootouts for specific titles, complete with notes.)

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You Say You Want a Revelation? Well, You Know…

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals

We get letters from time to time chiding us for charging what strikes some people as rather large amounts of money for records that we would be the first to admit do not have much in the way of Collector Value, the assumption being that collectible records are of course worth the high prices they command in the marketplace, if for no other reason than that their prices are set by the market.

The writers of these letters are convinced that our Hot Stamper pressings, for some reason or another, are a very different animal. They simply can’t be worth the seemingly outrageous prices we ask for them.

Let’s be honest: if you don’t like our prices, you have plenty of other sources for the records we sell. And it’s unlikely that anyone would charge as much as we charge for what appears to be the same pressing, although it does happen.

(The phrase “appears to be” in the sentence above is at the heart of our business model. It is also foundational to much of what you need to know in order to collect better sounding records. The 6000 entries on this blog are dedicated to helping you understand everything that follows from that premise.)

Customer Satisfaction Is Everything to Us

Some of our customers seem to be inordinately pleased with their purchases. We know that because they’ve told us so.

  • One of our customers paid $700 for a copy of Aja and — mirabile dictu — he’s actually glad he did.
  • Another customer wrote to tell us how much he liked the copy of Let It Be we sent him:

“I would have paid $15,000 for this feeling had I known it was there.”

  • Was our Hot Stamper pressing of Deja Vu a bargain at $800? This customer thought it was.

Revelatory Sound Quality Can Be Yours

Some of our customers have found the sound of our Hot Stamper pressings to be nothing less than a revelation, especially the customers who’ve taken the time to compare them to the Heavy Vinyl or Half-Speed mastered pressings of the same titles they owned.

This prompted some of them to swear off the modern masterings they used to like. This, as you can imagine, warmed our hearts no end.

Our How-To Guide Is Free

If you want to do the work yourself and avoid the cost of buying our Hot Stamper pressings, we are behind you all the way.

We even tell you how to go about it.

You can buy records from us, or you can learn to do your own shootouts.

The one thing you can’t do is buy a ready-made superior sounding remastered copy of anything, no matter what anyone may tell you.

After 36 years in the audiophile record business, having conducted thousands upon thousands of Hot Stamper shootouts — using the process which allowed us to discover the best sounding pressings of countless titles in every genre of music — we can tell you with confidence that records don’t work that way.

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