The records on this list (limited to rock and pop for the most part but we’re working on adding in the classical and jazz) all have one thing in common: I made practical use of them to improve my equipment, room treatments, table setup, electrical quality and whatever else that I could think of that might result in higher quality playback.
Were it not for my desire — obsession may be the better word, and it’s certainly a better operating principle — to get the wonderful music on these albums to improve with each passing year, Hot Stamper pressings would be at most a niche part of my collection. Worse, and a thought some may find too unpleasant to contemplate, Hot Stampers might have then accounted for only a small part of Better Records’ business.
By the mid-2000s when we started down this road for real, the stereo needed to evolve dramatically. It needed to become much more revealing and truthful than any system I had ever heard if we were going to carry out Hot Stamper shootouts all day.
The best of the best Hot Stamper pressings are often like needles in haystacks. No one in his right mind would go to all that trouble for music that was not emotionally powerful enough to be, for all intents and purposes, practically irresistible.
If you have records you can’t wait to play every time you make a change to your equipment, room, setup, etc., you know what I am talking about.
I favor large scale dynamic speakers because they are the only ones that seem capable of reproducing the demanding recordings you see listed below.
There is no question that the artists that made these albums, in concert with remarkably talented producers and engineers, sweated every detail of these exceptional recordings. For the last five decades I (now we) have been doing all we could to get these wonderful records to sound their best.
We know how good they can sound on systems that have what it takes to play them, because these are the records we used to test, tune and tweak the new studio we built.
The more of that kind of work you do — on your system, room and electricity — the more progress you will make in this hobby. With each improvement, these are the very recordings that will sound bigger and bolder than you ever imagined.
They are the most difficult-to-reproduce albums we know of. Difficult records are the ones that will help you make more real, demonstrable progress in this hobby than any others.
Again and again it was meeting the challenge of reproducing recordings such as these that allowed us to get to the next level, and the next one, and the one after that, and they can do the same for you.
The Top Two
By far the two most helpful records for testing over the last two decades were Tea for the Tillerman (going all the way back to 1984) and Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular. We wrote about their uniquely valuable contributions to our audio progress in this commentary.
Led Zeppelin II is probably the main record our current listening panel uses to dial-in the Dynavector 17Dx cartridges we mount three or four times a year so that every record is always being played with a relatively fresh cartridge. (We are dealers for Dynavector and would love to get you one to try.)
The records below in bold have been especially important for our work. They tend to be the titles that we played while tweaking and tuning the system, trying to solve one problem or another that we thought we heard when playing them. There should be quite a number of commentaries on the blog for each of them.
Also, at the bottom you will notice that more and more jazz and classical records are being added to the list as time permits.
Rock, Pop, etc.
