*Basic Concepts

These commentaries illustrate some of the concepts we’ve found to be helpful in understanding and evaluating the sound quality of recordings.

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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Hot Stampers and Good Sounding Records Are Not the Same Thing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan Available Now

They are barely even related. Here’s why.

A good customer wrote to us recently to say that he was not happy with the Stevie Ray Vaughan White Hot Stamper pressings we had sent him.

Tom,

I also have a couple more returns for you: SRV Couldn’t Stand the Weather and SRV Soul to Soul. While these are good, they’re just not quite up to White Hot Stamper quality like some of the other records clearly are.

I took the opportunity to reply at length.

Dear Sir,

You appear to be conflating two concepts, Hot Stampers and good recordings. They are not the same thing. They are barely even related.

Hot Stampers are especially good sounding pressings of specific albums that we found through shootouts.

The recordings of these albums may be better or worse than others you are familiar with. That has nothing to do with how hot the stampers are of the pressings we sell.

It works this way: if you had a hundred copies of The Dark Side of the Moon, the median pressing– the one that would have ranked number 50 out of 100 — would sound substantially better than either of those two SRV albums.

Pink Floyd: amazing recording. 

SRV: good, not great recording.

We would never sell an average pressing of DSOTM. We only sell the best sounding versions of it.

We would never sell the average version of any SRV album. We only sell the best sounding versions of them.

But no SRV album is ever going to sound like a good Dark Side of the Moon! (more…)

Two of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make Collecting Records

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

To be clear, it’s only a mistake if you are looking for top quality sound.

If, however, you are a record collector who doesn’t care about the sound of your records and is just looking for music to play, you may want to consider the very real possibility that you are on the wrong site. At the very least you are probably wasting your time.

Do you know many audiophiles who own multiple copies of the same album?

Some? Sure, okay. How many of them are still hunting around for more? Not many, right?

I’ve been buying duplicate copies of my favorite albums for more than three decades, but I’m not exactly your average audiophile record collector.

Fortunately for me, with the advent of Better Records in 1987, I’ve had an outlet for the second- and third-rate pressings I choose not to keep. (What’s left of my audiophile pressings are being sold on ebay these days. Good riddance!)

A few audiophile friends have multiple copies, but most audiophiles I know usually stop after one, or at most two or three.

At least they know not to make the worst mistake of them all: buying an audiophile pressing and figuring that that’s the one to keep.

Tossing out their vintage pressings, or never bothering to buy vintage pressings in the first place guarantees you will never have an especially good sounding collection of records to play.

Those of you who take the time to read our Hot Stamper commentary, whether you buy any of our special pressings or not, no doubt know better. At least I hope you do.

Hearing Is Believing

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo.

Nobody, and we mean nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are on about.

If that’s too much trouble, you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world, the ones who don’t know just how dramatic pressing variations for records and CDs can be. Probably a fairly large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much — this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything — you know the kind — and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even their own two ears.

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The Four Pillars of Success

What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many copies of the same album as you can get your hands on.

There are basically four steps in this process. In order to discover your own Hot Stampers, you must take great pains with all four if you are going to find success in evaluating the pressings you’ve found.

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 those of you who spend much of their time on this blog, our commentary here is simply lays out the basic formula for the process. 

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

The work required to find Hot Stamper pressings comprises these four steps.

  1. You must have a sufficient number of copies to play in order to find at least one “hot” one.
  2. You must be able to clean your copies properly in order to get them to sound their best.
  3. You must be able to reproduce your copies faithfully.
  4. You must be able to evaluate them critically.

How It Used to Be

It’s an open question whether before, say, 2010 we could have done shootouts for many of the albums you’ve seen come to the site since then. Frankly, I have my doubts.

But the good news in audio is that things change. It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad now sound pretty darn good. The site is full of commentaries about them. Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper Revolution is all about.

You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and consider the case closed. You did the right thing, you played by the rules, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, all that kind of stuff. Cross that title off and move on to the next.

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A Short Primer on Some of the Qualities We’re Listening For

Record Shootouts Are Tricky – Here Are Some of the Lessons We’ve Learned

For our last Hot Stamper pressing of Shepherd Moons, we noted:

This may not be our favorite music in the world, but it’s hard to argue with sound as good as this.

We went on to add:

The sound here is airy, open, spacious, and transparent, as well as tonally correct, clear and present.

Those are the qualities of our shootout winning pressings that we found to be the most compelling.

But is that everything we were listening for? Of course not.

So precisely what are the criteria by which a record like Shepard Moons should be judged?

Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings:

  • energy,
  • vocal presence,
  • frequency extension (on both ends),
  • transparency,
  • harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key),
  • rhythmic drive,
  • tonal correctness,
  • fullness,
  • size,
  • space, and
  • Tubey Magic.

When we can get all, or almost all, of the qualities above to come together on any given side, we provisionally award it a grade of “contender.”

Once we’ve been through all our copies on one side, we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side.

Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides matched up.

It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself. We guarantee you have never heard this music — really, any music — sound better than it does on one of our Hot Stamper pressings, or your money back.

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Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions about shootouts.

I answered most of them in Part One of this commentary. Here are the questions he posed that remain to be answered.

[I]f you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [the best stampers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

First Question

If I may paraphrase, you’re asking, “do the right stampers always get good grades?”

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2-Packs – The Best Case for Dramatic Pressing Variations

More of the Music of The Eagles

Just today (3/16/15) we put up a White Hot Stamper 2-pack of the Eagles’ First Album. One of the two pressings that made up the 2-pack had a killer side two, practically As Good As It Gets. 

What was interesting about that particular record was how bad side one was.

Side one of that copy — on the white label, with stampers that are usually killer — was terrible.

The vocals were hard, shrill and spitty. My notes say “CD sound.”

When a record sounds like a CD it goes in the trade-in pile, not on our site.

We encouraged the lucky owner to play the bad side for himself, just to hear how awful it is. Yet surprisingly, one might even say shockingly, it has exactly the qualities that audiophiles and collectors are most often satisfied with: the right label, and, in this case, even the right stampers (assuming anyone besides us would know what the right stampers are).

The problem was it didn’t have the right sound.

I know our customers can hear the difference, but can the rest of the audio world? Most of my reading on the internet makes me doubt that they can. When some people say that the differences between pressings can’t be all that big, I only wish they could have played the two sides of this copy.

Or  had higher quality reproduction so that these differences become less ignorable.

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The Science of Hot Stampers – Incomplete, Imperfect, and (Gulp!) Provisional

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

We have a section on the blog you may have seen called live and learn.

It’s devoted to discussing the records we think we we were wrong about.

Oh yes, it’s true. But it’s not really a problem for us here at Better Records. We see no need to cover up our mistakes. The process of learning involves recognizing and correcting previous errors.

Approached scientifically, all knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is incomplete, imperfect, and must be considered provisional.

What seems true today might easily be proven false tomorrow. If you haven’t discovered that for yourself yet, one thing’s for certain, you haven’t been in this hobby for very long.

We’re so used to the conventional wisdom being wrong, and having our own previous findings overturned by new ones, that we gladly go out of our way in listing after listing to point out just how wrong we were. (And of course why we think we are correct now.)

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

Each time we go back and play a 180 gram or Half-Speed mastered LP we used to like (or dislike), we gain a better understanding of its true nature. (The bulk of those “audiophile” pressings seem to get worse and worse over time, a subject that has been thoroughly discussed on the blog.)

Record cleaning gets better, front ends get better, electronics get better, tweaks get better, rooms get better — every aspect of your playback system should be improving on a regular basis, allowing you to more correctly identify the strengths and weaknesses of every record you play.

I almost forgot: your ears get better too, whether you like it or not. If that’s not happening, you’re probably not doing some very important things right. (Maybe some of your records are holding you back.)

What follows is a typical excerpt from a recent listing.

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Letter of the Week – “I would appreciate the opportunity to speak to someone about the factors that make this a “White Hot Pressing.””

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now

A customer recently contacted us after making his first purchase and being disappointed with the White Hot Stamper pressing we had sent him.

Hi,

Wondered who I can talk to about this record that I purchased. I’ve listened to it numerous times and it just does not have that sound stage I was expecting.

I am not looking for a refund. In fact, I refuse a refund. However, I would appreciate the opportunity to speak to someone about the factors that make this a “White Hot Pressing.”

I’m sure you need to understand what amplifier, speakers, setting, etc. I am using. Without going into the details, I have a McIntosh amplifier and Focal 936 speakers. I know how much of a difference equipment makes in the sound of a record.

I love to hear amazing records, some of which I have in original pressings I purchased when they were released and can truly feel it when there is something special about the record. This one does not seem to have it to me, but I am interested in finding and purchasing one from you that gives that amazing feeling.

Please let me know if there is someone I can speak to about finding that record.

Thank you,
S.

I replied with an overwhelming amount of information (and opinions!) designed to help Mr. S understand more about records, as follows:

Dear Sir,

Tom here. Let me see if I can help.

The first thing I would need to know is what version of the album do you have that you think sounds better, or, if not better, comparable?

[He had no other pressing, not surprising as our White Hot copies are practically impossible to beat.]

Assuming you don’t have a better copy — we would be very surprised if you did — we would say that it’s likely there are two factors at play:

White Hot does not mean amazing Demo Disc sound.

It means the best sound we can find for this recording, relative to the others we play. In other words, the best there is within the limitations of the recording.

We can’t fix the recording, we can only find you the best available pressing. If you were expecting more, something along the lines of Dark Side of the Moon, then I understand your disappointment.

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