*Collecting Better Records

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

Half-Speed Masters – Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Mobile Fidelity released a version of Diamonds and Rust on Anadisq in 1995, and if you want to hear a pressing that’s not murky, compressed and opaque, you would be wise to avoid their remastered pressing.

To be fair, MoFi has made some reasonably good sounding records too. For those of you whose budget is on the limited side, if you find an affordable copy of any of these MoFis, you are probably not completely wasting your money.

Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Our advice for the longest time has been that, while you are actively improving your stereo, room and setup, the best way to use your remastered audiophile pressings is as stopgaps and benchmarks.

As you make more and more progress, eventually you will find the vintage pressings that can show you what your audiophile pressings don’t do well, or at the very least, not as well as they should.

The unfortunate reality — considering how much money you had invested in them — is that they were falling short in many ways for all the years you had been playing them, but until you improved your playback, those problems were hidden from you.

Charting Your Success

As your stereo improves, you can actually chart your success by how many of these kinds of records you are able to eliminate from your collection. Once you can count the number of modern reissues you still own on one or two hands, there is a good chance you have reached a much higher level of playback.

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Sonny Rollins Helped Us See the Light Many Years Ago

The following commentary was taken from our mid-90s catalogs, the ones that came out back in the days when it was still possible to find great jazz records like Alternate Takes for cheap, often still sealed.

The Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl recuts done by Doug Sax had come out a few years earlier, starting in 1992. Those remastered records were in print at the time I wrote this, and I was pretty pissed off at the way they sounded.

Here is our listing with some minor changes from long ago:

Acoustic Sounds had just remastered and ruined a big batch of famous jazz records, and shortly thereafter a certain writer in The Absolute Sound had said nice things about them.

Said writer and I got into a war of words over these records, long, long ago. You’ll notice that no one ever mentions these awful records anymore, and for good reason: they suck. If you own any of them, do yourself a favor and get either the CD or a good LP for comparison purposes. I expect you will hear what I’m talking about.

In my essay on reviewers I attack him for giving a big “Thumbs Up” in TAS to the botched remastering of Sonny’s Way Out West. The OJC reissue, though superior, is still only a pale shadow of the original.

The Real Deal

Now we have the real thing! This LP has three alternate takes from that session, all mastered by George Horn, and surprise, surprise, surprise, they sound just like my original, much better than (but not so different from) the OJC, and worlds away from the muted flab of the Analogue Productions LP!

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Who Can Explain Why This Cheap Reissue Sounds So Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

This Decca reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet.

Roy Wallace was the engineer for these sessions from 1955 to 1962 in Geneva’s glorious sounding Victoria Hall. His work here is superb in all respects.

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording, with the added benefit of mastering using more modern, but apparently still good, cutting equipment from the ’70s, 1972 to be exact.

We are of course here referring to the often amazing modern mastering of 40+ years ago, not the mediocre-at-best modern mastering of today.

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these superb sides.

We were impressed with the fact that it excelled in so many areas of reproduction. The illusion of disappearing speakers is one of the more attractive aspects of the sound here, pulling the listener into the space of the concert hall in an especially engrossing way.

Thread It Up and Just Hit Play Already

What might be seen as odd — odd to some audiophiles but not to us — was how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the best copies.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, smooth, sweet sound of the album is on the tape, and that all one has to do to get that vintage sound on to a record is simply to thread up the master on a good machine and hit play.

The fact that nobody seems to be able to make an especially good sounding record these days makes clear that in fact I’m wrong to think that this approach would work. It seems to me that somebody should be able to figure out how to do it. In our experience that is simply not the case today, and has not been for many years.

Old Tapes, New Tapes

The master tapes were about fifteen years old when this record was mastered.

Compare that to a current cutting which would be made from approximately fifty year old tapes.

Perhaps that explains it.

Or maybe it doesn’t.

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The Thrill of Discovering Great Recordings

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

This shootout was many years in the making – we’d been trying to do these wonderful overtures for about five years, which just goes to show how hard it is nowadays to find records like these in audiophile playing condition.

We also just debuted a Decca recording with Ansermet at the helm under the title French Overtures featuring two of the pieces found here, and it’s every bit as good.

Which one is better is probably a matter of taste as they are both head and shoulders better than any other recordings of the music that we’ve come across in the last five or ten years. This is often what you are paying for when you buy a White Hot Stamper pressing — the best sound we know of for the music.

We admit that “we know of” is doing a good deal of heavy lifting in the preceding sentence, but the world is full of records and we can’t have played them all, so in the unlikely event that we find something better down the road, do not be too surprised, it happens.

Side One

  • So huge and tubey
  • 3D and spacious and extending high and low
  • Lush strings
  • More realistic and dynamic
  • Big low end
  • Tubey

Side Two

  • 3D, tubey and lush
  • Huge low end and brass
  • Realistic space and cymbals
  • Not hot at all

Let Me Ask You This

Who else is finding incredible Demo Discs like this EMI from 1972 nowadays?

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Billy The Kid / Rodeo – How Do the Record Club Copies Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

Without anyone knowing, a Record Club pressing found its way into one of our shootouts a few years back. Because the person doing the listening has no idea what pressing is on the table, biases and prejudices cannot affect the grading or the outcome of the shootout.

It earned Two Pluses, not enough to win a shootout, but enough to put practically any orchestral record made in the last thirty years to shame. We noted at the time:

This spectacular Demo Disc recording is clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the BIG, BOLD sound we love. There is a note on the inner sleeve that says this was a Record Club of America purchase in 1973.

Can you imagine that a Record Club was offering records in 1973 that were better sounding than anything being made today? Astonishing.

There are about 150 orchestral recordings we think offer the best performance coupled with the highest quality sound. This record has earned a place on that list.

If you’re a fan of orchestral showpieces such as these, this recording from 1967 belongs in your collection.

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Acoustic Sounds Was Selling This Ridiculously Bad “TAS List” Record Back in the Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

This commentary was written circa 2001. 

I remember 15 years ago when Acoustic Sounds was selling the then in-print 25th Anniversary Island pressing (with 7U stampers as I recall) for $15, claiming that it was a TAS List record. If you’ve ever heard the pressing, you know it has no business going anywhere near a Super Disc List. It’s mediocre at best and has virtually none of the magic of the good originals.

NEWSFLASH: Just looked it up on Discogs, a site that did not exist when I wrote this commentary. My memory is apparently better than I thought it was. The 25th Anniversary Island Life Collection pressing came out in 1986.

    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 1): ILPM 9154 A-1 ILPM•9154•A1
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 1): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-1-3
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 2): ILPM 9154 A-8U-1- G10
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 2): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-

By the way, I am not aware of any of these pressings from the 80s being especially good sounding. I remember playing some of them but I don’t remember liking any of them. They were cheap reissues that satisfied those looking for import vinyl, not audiophile quality sound.

I refused to sell it back in those days, for no other reason than the fact that it’s far from a Better Sounding Record. I don’t like misrepresenting records and I don’t like ripping off my customers. It’s bad for business.

That pressing was a fraud and I was having none of it.

Chad probably didn’t even know the difference.

When you don’t know much about records, you can say all sorts of things and not get called out for them. Audiophiles are a credulous bunch and always have been. They still believe the same nonsense that I foolishly fell for back in the 80s. (And I admit that even as late as 2006 I was still a fan of certain Heavy Vinyl pressings.)

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Out of Our Heads – Mono or Reprocessed Stereo?

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

On this London LP, even though it states clearly on the cover that the record is electronically re-processed into stereo, the songs we heard on side one were in dead mono.

So much for believing what you read on album covers.

This Sonny Rollins pressing of Tenor Madness says it too has been remastered into stereo, but you would have a hard time hearing any left-right information coming from your speakers. On headphones, maybe, but speakers? Unlikely.

Even when a record has been been reprocessed from mono into stereo, it can still sound very good. Not the best, mind you, but good enough to easily wipe the floor with anything pressed by any audiophile label that we’ve ever heard of, and we’ve heard of pretty much all of them.

More on the subject of mono versus stereo.

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Remind Me, What Is the Point of Listening to a Quiet Record with Mediocre Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

A lackluster reissue from Philips, bad enough to qualify for our hall of shame.

This is some truly dead as a doornail sound, sound which is not remotely competitive with the real Mercury pressings we’ve played. The FR pressings of the recording can be phenomenally good.  Even the later M2 pressings from Philips can be excellent. 

Back in the 80s and 90s, I actually used to like some of the Golden Import pressings.  That was a long time go, and thankfully our playback system is quite a bit more revealing than the one I had back in those days.

After playing literally tens of thousands of records since then, my critical listening skills are better too.

Now when I play these imports, they sound veiled, overly smooth, smeary and compressed, not too different from the average Philips pressing, which of course is exactly what they are. They’re all remastered by Philips, to give the Mercury tapes the sound that Philips thinks they should have. Sadly, not much of the Mercury Living Presence sound has survived.

We complain about mixing and mastering engineers who felt compelled to bring a new sound to old favorites.

The Philips label that produced the Golden Import series are serial offenders in this regard.

The Golden Import pressings might be good for audiophiles who care more about quiet surfaces than good sound.  We are firmly staked at the opposite side of that trade-off.

Quiet vinyl means nothing if the sound is poor, or, at the very least, wrong for the recording.

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The Real Eagles Sound Comes From the Real Eagles Master Tape

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This commentary may be roughly twenty years old, but we think it holds up just fine.

At one time this was my single favorite Demo Disc.

A customer who bought one of these once told me it was the best sounding record he had ever heard in his life. I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s certainly as good as any rock record I have ever heard, and I’ve heard an awful lot of very good ones.

There’s an interesting story behind this album, which I won’t belabor here. One listen to a later reissue or Heavy Vinyl pressing or Greatest Hits and you’ll know I speak the truth when I say that the tape used to cut this pressing was never used again to cut another.

It is GONE. LOST FOREVER. Most copies of this album are mediocre at best, and positively painful to listen to once you’ve heard the right pressing, the one cut from the real tape.

Which mostly explains why I never had any respect for this first album. The average copy sounds so bad that the musical values just aren’t communicated to the listener. Isn’t this why we have all this fancy equipment in the first place, to allow the musicians to communicate with us the way they intended? And when the record is a poor reproduction of the artist’s work, it prevents this communication from taking place. (And don’t get me started about CDs.)

Accidental Discoveries

Those poor reproductions are probably the ones you have, if you even have a copy of the album at all. I’ve been buying Eagles records for more than 30 40 years and I only discovered my first hot stamper pressing around 2001. Of course I found it entirely by accident, with no inkling beforehand that the album could possibly sound remotely as good as that amazing copy was sounding all those years ago. I played Train Leaves Here This Morning for anyone who wanted to hear the system at its best (back when I had the monstrous Whisper system in my living room).

Before that I had heard a number of flat sounding versions and concluded, as most audiophiles would, that the album must be poorly recorded. I stopped thinking like that soon after, which is one of the main reasons you can find amazing sounding pressings of albums on our site that aren’t supposed to sound any good. (Do a quick Google search and see if any audiophile has anything good to say about the album. We came up empty-handed.)

If you own one of those bad later pressings, it’s a record you might have played once or twice, gotten little out of, and put it back on the shelf, wondering why those stupid Eagles couldn’t get their act together and record their music better.

But they did! They were recorded brilliantly. Glyn Johns, the recording engineer, is a genius. The sound is smooth, rich, sweet and Tubey Magical beyond belief.

I would say it’s as good a pop/rock recording as any I have ever heard, and better than 99.99% of the competition.

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1A, or Is 1B Better on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme? Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel Available Now

UPDATE 2024

Speaking of 1A and 1B, the evidence is in. We have now confirmed that one of these sets of stampers (one for each side) can win shootouts. Which of the two it is we will leave to you to discover, as we make it a point never to give out the shootout winning stampers except under the rarest of circumstances. We give out plenty of stamper information, just not the stampers of the winners.

We now return to our commentary from many years ago:

Before we go any further, I have one question:

Why are we guessing?

I received an email recently from a customer who had gone to great pains to do his own shootout for a record; in the end he came up short, with not a lot to show for his time and effort. It had this bit tucked in toward the end:

Some of [Better Records’] Hot Stampers are very dear in price and most often due to the fact that there are so few copies in near mint condition. I hate to think of all the great Hot Stampers that have ended up in piles on the floor night after night with beer, Coke, and seeds being ground into them.

Can you imagine all the 1A 1B or even 2A 2B masters that ended up this way or were just played to death with a stylus that would be better used as a nail than to play a record!

To be clear, it’s extremely unlikely than any Hot Stampers have ever ended up in piles on the floor. Hot Stampers are not just originals or good sounding records.

They are pressings that have been cleaned, gone through the shootout process and found to be superior to their competition. Until they prove themselves, records like the ones whose unfortunate fate this reviewer fantasizes about are just old records that had the potential to sound good but never got the chance to demonstrate they had better sound than other pressings.

As it so happens, shortly thereafter I found myself on Michael Fremer’s old website of all places, where I saw something eerily similar in his review for the (no doubt awful) Sundazed vinyl. I quote below the relevant paragraphs.

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