*Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

Thoughts on Classical Music and My Hot Stamper Collection

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Since moving to Georgia in 2023, my Hot Stamper listening sessions have come to a stop. I still have clear memories of hearing some of the great albums we sell, and many of those recollections inform the commentary found on this blog.

Dear Tom,

So what I can’t get out of my mind, you have been doing this all these years, your own personal collection must be the creme de la creme. Cannot even imagine. But sure would love to hear!

Dear Chuck,

I’ve had an extensive record collection for all of my life, right up until about fifteen years ago. Starting at the tender young age of 10, I bought the 45 of She Loves You on Swan records, which I still own. Can’t play it, it’s broken, but I keep it anyway. When I was a kid, I used to take my two dollar weekly allowance and buy two 45s with it. Did that for years. Still have them, close to two hundred in old carrying cases. I look forward to playing them in my retirement.

I had hundreds of amazing sounding LPs in my collection, the best of the best from more than 20 years of doing shootouts. About fifteen years ago I asked myself what were all these great sounding records sitting on a shelf for? I never played them because I got to hear all my favorite records every day, and after playing records all day, the last thing I wanted to do at night or on a weekend was pull a record off the shelf and play it.

So I put all my personal records into shootouts, and sometimes they did well and sometimes they did not. (Those of you who go back and play your old records from years past will surely find some real surprises, both good and bad.)

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The 20 to 1 Ratio for Finding Your Personal Favorites

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured on the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem).

Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten about sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (and one that is still on its way to him):

Hey Tom, 

So I go on YouTube to refresh my memory and listen and James Taylor, that could be good, Toto, what a feel good album, brings back memories, Wish You Were Here, already have a pretty good copy, Sinatra-Basie, what’s that?

So I go to YouTube and first track HOLY CRAP! You know it’s good when you’re throwing a sound stage off your lap-top! Basie orchestra, perfect. Frank comes in swinging and man that guy was so freaking cool, people today have no idea how unbelievably cool he was, and so like 20 seconds if that I am SOLD!

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We Don’t Know — And We’ve Learned Over the Years Not to Pretend To

More on the Subject of Pretentious Knowledge

In our twenty-year-old review for the Speakers Corner pressing of the Tsar Saltan we made the following claim, a claim which we obviously had no evidence to back up.

But… when I hear this kind of sound only one word comes to mind, a terrible word, a word that makes us recoil in shock and horror. That word is DUB. This reissue is made from copy tapes, not masters.

It was foolish of us to declare any such thing, especially with such certainty. How on earth could we possibly know what tapes were used to master the record, in Germany of all places? The very idea is absurd. We call people out for saying things they have no evidence to support all the time. Running into this review today, I have to call myself out for such nonsense. What I should have said was the following:

This reissue sounds to us as though it has been made from copy tapes.

Just to be clear, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that it sounds like a copy tape was used to master the record, but I am not at all justified in saying that a copy tape was actually used to master the record.

Nor do I have any business talking about about the sound of a master tape I’ve never heard.

I can certainly talk about the sound of the best London pressings. Those I have played. I’ve listened to batches of them over the course of many years. They may be expensve but they are not hard to find. We’ve sold dozens of them as Hot Stamper pressings and played plenty of others with sound not good enough or surfaces not quiet enough to offer to our customers.

Whatever approach Decca may have used in the mastering, with whatever tape they may have used to make the records that we’ve auditioned, is information that would be nice to have. But it’s really none of my business, since it doesn’t alter the sound of the pressings we auditioned.

More importantly, it’s none of Better Records’ business.

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Commitment Issues We All Must Face

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary about a very special 2-pack was written close to ten years ago. We think it’s every bit as true today as it was then.

The long and the short of it is simply that when it comes to collecting high quality vinyl:

There are no easy answers and there are no quick fixes.

To those of us who have been doing this for a long time, the above is obvious, perhaps even axiomatic in the sense that it is a “self-evident truth that requires no proof.”

(The fact that the modern audiophile reviewer class has yet to appreciate this basic concept goes a long way in explaining how inadequate and error-prone their approach to records and audio has always been. Some of them may still be living in 1982, but I’m glad to say we’re not. Our business could not exist in 1982. Many of the technologies on which it is based had not yet been invented.)

Once you stop looking for easy answers and quick fixes, you will then be free to build a truly wonderful stereo system and acquire a superb sounding record collection to play on it. It will, naturally, and to some of you surprisingly, comprise virtually nothing but vintage vinyl.

The album under discussion today is Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull. Our commentary begins:

It took two records to make this White Hot Stamper 2-pack, with top quality sound from start to finish. The result? One of the best sounding, if not THE best sounding copy to ever hit the site. If you’re a Joni fan this is one of her strongest records, and one that definitely belongs in your collection. If you own any other pressing we’re confident that this copy will positively blow your mind.

These two sides have the kind of sound quality you probably never imagined would be possible — but it is! We played it, we heard it for ourselves, and now we offer it to you, the Joni Mitchell (nee Roberta Joan Anderson) fans of the world.

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Four Dollars a Spin Seems Like a Fair Price to Pay

Plenty of Hot Stamper Pressings to Choose From in the Range of $200

One of our good customers wrote to us a while ago (2021) and confessed:

“I never thought I would spend $200 for a record but I do hear the difference.”

We replied:

If that’s a favorite record of yours, you can now enjoy it for the rest of your life knowing you have a killer copy in your collection to play whenever you damn well please (assuming the kids and the wife are out of the house).

Based on what I am reading, the pressing we sent you 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.

Outrageous

This is an outrageous amount of money for one record to some people.  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. To quote Pete Townshend, I call that a bargain.

Can you afford to replace every record in your collection with a $200 Hot Stamper pressing? Of course not. Almost nobody can. But that’s not really what’s at the heart of our service.

We are offering exceptional copies of your favorite albums. (And of course some records that are soon to become your favorite albums.)

These are records that are guaranteed to be better than any other pressing you can find at any price.

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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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Why Do We Wait?

Hot Stampers and Audio Progress Go Hand in Hand

Practically all of our audio philosophy derives from the simple act of trying to get the stereo system to play the greatest recordings of all time with the highest fidelity possible.

For my first twenty years in audio — roughly 1975 to 1995 — I made change after change in my equipment and setup to improve the sound quality of the music I loved. It’s an article of faith we me that to get anywhere in this hobby, music must do the driving.

When I started my record business in 1987, I discovered that higher fidelity playback allowed me to do a better job of evaluating the records I was selling. By the late-90s, continuing improvements to that system were helping me to find — you guessed it — Hot Stamper pressings.

“‘How much progress shall you make?’ you ask. Just as much as you try to make. Why do you wait? Wisdom comes haphazard to no man.” — Seneca

Practicing the skills you seek to develop is the only sure way to get better at what you are trying to do.

But where have you ever seen those concepts applied to improving your own critical listening skills outside of this blog?

For those who want to improve in this devilishly difficult hobby of ours, the question that needs answering is:

What are some good ways to challenge yourself as an audiophile?

Turns out there are plenty, and they’re really not that hard. Better yet, none of them will cost you a dime.

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Are You an Audiophile Soldier or an Audiophile Scout?

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

The guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records. Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how much better used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten a mere sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45, still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.) 

Click on the picture to make it easier to read.

As you may have read on the site elsewhere, the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?

No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.

You must keep testing all the reissues you can find, and you must keep testing all the originals you can find.

Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of very special records. That’s why you must do them.

Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us), you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances in which you just got lucky.

In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.

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Better Sounding Records? Lucks Explains a Lot

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written many years ago. It concerns a subject which does not get nearly enough discussion in the audiophile community: the subject of luck in audio and records.

Back in the 70s I was very lucky to have bought some exceptionally good pressings of albums that quickly became personal favorites and have remained so ever since.

This album and others like it were the reason I chose to keep going deeper into audio, which, to be honest, pretty much sums up my life story.

No skill was involved in finding these records. No real knowledge either. It was all just dumb luck. Perhaps you will agree with me that much of life seems to work that way.

Silk Degrees

Most copies severely lack presence and top end. Dull, thick, opaque sound is far too common on Silk Degrees, which may account for some audiophiles finding the Half-Speed an improvement.

Despite all the bad sound I found for this album, I kept buying copies of this record in the hopes that someday I would find one that sounded good. I remember playing this record when it came out in 1976 and thinking that it sounded very good. So how is it that all the copies I’m playing sound so bad, or at the very least, wrong?

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The Really Big Questions Rarely Have Good Answers

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

On this blog we have a section devoted to a great many questions that often come up when audiophiles are thinking about records.

By clicking on the link above, you will find, among other subjects, discussions of the “working knowledge” some collectors use to identify what they believe to be pressings with superior sound.

To be sure, these are some very important questions, which, judging by what I read on the web, many audiophiles think they have the answers to.

Before we go any farther, we should make our position on these questions clear to our readers.

We’re really not that interested in big questions, mostly because there aren’t any big answers for them.

When it comes to records, being able to reveal deep underlying truths about a wide range of vinyl pressings is simply not possible. To be honest, we don’t think it can be done.

Knowledge

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of working knowledge. It’s that we have so much of it that we needed a blog to hold it all so that we could share it with others.

No, our working knowledge is made up of lots of little bits of data that guide us in discovering the best sounding pressings for the individual titles we choose to play.

It would be nice to have general rules to help us in our search for better sound on vinyl, but our experience tells us that general rules are so unreliable that they fail to function as rules at all.

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