*Collecting Better Records

Ideas and methods for collecting the best sounding pressings of your favorite music.

Three Labels, But Only One Ever Wins Shootouts

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better on the Right Reissue

There are three Epic labels for this record.

The originals are yellow, the first reissue is orange, and the last reissue is bluish black.

I can tell you that only one of those labels produced the best sounding copies in our shootout.

Beyond that you will have to buy a sample of each and do your own shootout. Finding clean copies was quite difficult; it took us a long time to get enough to play, and, as we said, most pressings are dreadful.

Those of you who like to read our commentaries and play along at home are going to have a rough time with this title. We sure did.

But the results are worth it, because we LOVE this music! Music just doesn’t get any better. If this album doesn’t lift your spirits, I can’t imagine what would. And note that many of the best songs here are exclusive to this greatest hits and cannot be found on any other album. That makes it a Must Own in our book.

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Advice on Which Sgt. Peppers Pressings to Avoid

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This letter came in many years ago, but the lessons to be learned from Chris’s failed approch to finding a good sounding copy of Sgt. Pepper are no doubt timeless.

Many audiophiles who start collecting records make exactly the same mistakes Chris made, and some percentage of those audiophiles, however small, actually learn from them. Sad to say, it seems that many do not.

In our own humble attempt to rectify the situation, we devote a great deal of time to discussing record collecting on this blog, seeing as how so many audiophiles suffer by going about it in all the wrong ways.

Chris, an erstwhile customer from long ago, sent us a letter describing his search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading his letter is that many record collecting rules were broken in going about the search the way he did.

But then I thought:

What rules?

Whose rules?

Where exactly does one find these rules?

If one wants to avoid breaking them they need to be written down someplace, don’t they? Wikipedia maybe?

Sadly, no, not at Wikipedia, or any place else for that matter — until now. As crazy as it sounds, we are going to try to lay down a few record collecting rules for record loving audiophiles, specifically to aid these individuals in their search for better sounding vinyl pressings. And by “these individuals” we mean you.

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Another Dirty Little Secret of the Record Biz

More of the Music of Traffic

For our current take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy and The Best of Traffic, please click here.

Let’s talk about hits that are made from dubbed tapes.

The sound of some songs on some greatest hits albums can be better than the sound of those very same songs on the original pressings.

How can that be you ask, dumbfounded by the sheer ridiculousness of such a statement?

Well, dear reader, I’ll tell you. It’s a dirty little secret in the record biz that sometimes the master for the presumptive Hit Single (or singles) is pulled from the album’s final two track master mix tape and used to make the 45 single, the idea being that the single is what people are going to hear on the radio and want to buy. Or, having heard it sound so good on the radio, go out and buy the album.

One way or another, it’s the single that will do the selling of the band’s music. This is clearly the case with Mr. Fantasy on the original Island Pink Label pressing. (Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)

A dub is then made of the tape that was used to cut the 45 and spliced back into the album master, so that the single (or singles) is one generation down from the master for the other songs on the side.

This explains why the hit single from so many albums is often the worst sounding song on the album — it’s the one most likely to suffer from bad radio EQ and distorted, smeary, sub-generation sound.

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Why Would Anybody Pay Two Hundred Dollars for a Record?

Our Complete Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

Our good customer, Ryan, wrote to tell us just how much he liked the Hot Stamper pressing we sent him of Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints.

I responded with a few points about the service we provide to the well-healed audiophile. We do this by way of offering the best sounding pressings of your favorite albums, assuming that your favorite albums are the ones we offer on our site. (Many of them are favorites of mine.)

Most of the time our customers agree about the superior sound of our records, especially the customers (like Ryan) who do their own shootouts.)

Based on what I am reading, the pressing we sent Ryan is so good it’s practically priceless. But somebody had to put a price on it, and the price we landed on was two hundred bucks.

To some people this is an outrageous amount of money for one record. But not to someone who loves the album and will play it for the rest of his life. Once a month for 40 years comes to $4 a spin. With apologies to Pete Townshend, I call that a bargain.

If The Rhythm of the Saints is a favorite record of yours, you can now enjoy it for the rest of your life, secure in the knowledge that you have a killer copy in your collection waiting to be played whenever you damn well feel like it (assuming the kids and the wife are out of the house).

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It Took Us Three Attempts to Get The Captain and Me Going

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

By 2009 I had been randomly buying clean copies of The Captain and Me for two decades, with the expectation that one day I would play them and find the mysterious deadwax and other clues that would lead me to the potentially best sounding copies.

Even though I had learned a fair bit about stamper numbers by that time, there was no getting around the fact that the best stamper numbers cannot be predicted for any given title. I didn’t know any especially good ones, which means that I needed to learn them for this title the way I learned them for all the others — one album at a time.

As I was not a fan of the pre-McDonald Doobies, I confess I really had no idea what to look for. I probably had picked up a few of the exceedingly rare Green Label pressings, but were they the best? I couldn’t say. I just hadn’t spent enough time with the album. And I had disproved that old canard that the originals are always the best sounding so many times by then that believing that nonsense was out of the question.

We had tried twice before to get something going, but could not find the sound we were looking for and had simply given up and moved on to greener pastures. This is long before Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System had come our way in 2007. It, along with our Odyssey record cleaning machine and some other tricks we learned about record cleaning, allowed us to get a shootout going a couple of years later.

The failed attempts to understand the album mentioned above happened long before we had turned the business over to carrying out shootouts all day, every day, which is all we were doing by 2009. We had stopped promoting Heavy Vinyl in 2007, and by 2009 we were on our way to selling nothing but records we had cleaned and played and evaluated for their sound quality with our own ears.

Eventually we sat down with the copies of The Captain and Me that we had — more than thirty according to the listing you see below, the one we wrote at the time — and gave it our best shot.

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Practical Advice for Acquiring Hot Stampers for Anyone New to the Game

Our Guide to Record Collecting for Audiophiles

Our good customer ab_ba has some advice for those who are interested in improving the quality of their collections by acquiring more Hot Stamper pressings.

I have taken the liberty of editing parts of his letter, mostly to focus the reader’s attention on some of the practical tips Aaron wishes to share.

Hi Tom,

I’ve been your customer for over four years now, and I count more than 60 records of yours on my shelf. I know I’m not quite one of your heavy-hitter customers, but I’ve got enough familiarity to know how refreshingly different your ecosystem is from everything else out there. I’ve purchased white hot stampers from you for nearly all of my lifelong favorite albums.

I’ve purchased many super hots and even plain-old hot stampers, and many of them are among my most-played records. I’ve also used your site as a way to discover new music.

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Universal Japan and the Economics of Buying a Pig in a Poke

Skeptical Thinking Is Critical to Finding Better Records

One of my good customers sent me this email shortly after this series came out, circa 2000:

I noticed that Universal Japan has come out with several new titles, stuff I’m interested in, like Stevie Wonder / Innervisions… Stan Getz, James Brown… and many others — that are on acousticsounds.com.

Generally, for these somewhat expensive heavy vinyl releases (relative to used prices), I’m trying to stick with stuff where your site has favorable comments regarding the sound quality, but you don’t seem to carry these new items.

Do you think they are bad, or you just have not had a chance to check them out yet?”

I replied as follows:

We have a longstanding antipathy toward records pressed in Japan that were not recorded in Japan. (Here is one of the exceptions because the mastering was done by the real mastering engineer, using the real tape, here in America. There are also some excellent direct to disc albums that were recorded here in the states and subsequently pressed in Japan.)

Japanese pressings almost NEVER sound good to these ears. The only report I’ve heard concerned Aja, which was that it was awful, bright as bright can be.

A Japanese pressing that’s too bright? Shocking. Say it isn’t so.

We are going to be carrying almost no new releases of Heavy Vinyl pressings from now on.

They just don’t sound good to us and we don’t want to waste our time playing bad records when there are so many good ones sitting around that need a loving home.

If you pay $30 for Heavy Vinyl reissues and only one out of five sounds good — an optimistic estimate if you ask me — you’re really paying $150 for the one good one, right?

This makes no sense to me. And since the real odds are one out of ten, it’s really $300 for the good one.

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Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2025.

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another mistaken idea.

We evaluated an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last.

The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played.

We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Not sure what those two commas are doing there. Pausing for emphasis? Sure, why not? This is a big deal.

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is truly one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He might be, or at least he might choose to describe himself as one.

Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.

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Thinking About the Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars of Bread and Cat Stevens

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written years ago in an effort to promote the mostly forgotten and certainly overlooked qualities of Bread‘s superb recordings.

We are rarely able to do shootouts for their albums these days, due to a lack of interest on our customers’ parts, at least at the prices we tend to charge for great sounding pressings of their classic releases. More’s the pity.

Although we were able to do Manna in 2024, and The Best of Bread in 2025, our last shootout for On the Waters was way back in 2012.

Instead, we recommend you pick up some early pressings of Bread’s albums at your local record store and see if the wondeful analog sound Armin Steiner achieved in the studio makes you a fan of the band the way it did me.

More on Armin Steiner and Bread here.

In many ways On the Waters is a Demo Disc recording.

Listening to the Tubey Magical acoustic guitars on the best copies brings back memories of my first encounter with an original Pink Label Tea for the Tillerman. Rich, sweet, full-bodied, effortlessly dynamic — that sound knocked me out thirty-odd years ago, and here, on an album by the largely-forgotten band Bread, is that sound again.

Looking back, 1970 turned out to be a great year for rock and pop, arguably the greatest.

I’ve always been a sucker for this kind of well-crafted pop. If you are too, then a Hot Stamper copy of any of their releases will no doubt become a treasured Demo Disc in your home as well. 

Audiophiles with high quality turntables literally have an endless supply of good recordings to discover and enjoy.

No matter how many records you own, you can’t possibly have even scratched the surface of the vast recorded legacy of the last sixty years. 

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What It Took to Find Hot Stamper Pressings of Two Very Tough Titles

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

[Emphasis added.]

Hey Tom, 

Just got my Super Hot Stampers of Remain In Light and Station To Station. I was very much looking forward to the arrival of these LPs… I was not disappointed. Verily, I was completely floored!

First, my apologies. I have been reading your website for over two years, gleaning information to help me find Hot Stampers, or at least good sounding records. I had not made a purchase until this past week. I was starting to feel guilty; you have given me so much great direction and guidance over these years, and I had not supported you in the proper way.

So I made a modest purchase of these two records, to assuage my guilt and support your efforts. You will be getting much more business from this satisfied customer.

I have Remain In Light on LP, CD and even the FLAC file release. My new Hot Stamper truly puts these recordings to shame. No, really, TO SHAME! If this ever gets on the Better Records Testimonials: “People let me tell you…it’s sent a chill up and down my spine…”!

I really can’t believe how well balanced the sound is: great bottom end, mids are pronounced and the shrillness is GONE! No smear anymore! Breathtaking.

My copy of Station to Station is just as wonderful.

I’ve been convinced of “Hot Stamper” recording for quite some time now, thanks to Tom and the BR crew; I’ve found some great recordings after conducting my own modest shoot-outs. Found some real gems. But the best results that I have ever got, and there are only a few, have now been easily matched and outstripped by my first BR purchase!

Rob

Rob,

Thanks for your enthusiastic letter. We’re on the same page. I too get excited when I hear my favorite music sound better than I ever expected it would. (more…)