Clear Thinking

Practically everything we know about record pressings we learned by playing them, in record shootout after record shootout, starting way back in 2004.

Once you implement a scientific approach to evaluating record pressings, most of the thinking stops and the real learning begins.

Hot Stampers Simply Do Not Exist for Some Audiophiles

Please Consider Taking Some of Our Hard-Earned Audio Advice

It is an unfortunate fact that, at least for some audiophiles, Hot Stampers simply do not exist.

They may be lovers of sound, the dictionary definition of an audiophile, but their systems are not revealing and accurate enough to allow them to hear how good a properly-mastered, properly-pressed, properly-cleaned vintage (or maybe not so vintage) pressing can sound relative to whatever other version of the music they may have — Heavy Vinyl, cassette, CD, etc.

They simply do not possess a system (power, equipment, room, tweaks) of the quality required to play them at their best. 

Others won’t have developed the rudimentary listening skills needed to recognize the superior sound of a Hot Stamper pressing when it’s playing on their turntable.

Speculation? Opinion? Not really. Not when the evidence is this overwhelming. Let’s look at some of the facts.

A great many analog-oriented audiophiles are quite happy with the sound of Heavy Vinyl LPs, the kind that we regularly trash around here.

Those pressings set a decidedly low standard for sound quality, to our ears anyway, so if the typical audiophile is happy with them, what does that tell you about the quality of his audio chain and the nature of his critical listening skills?

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Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but listening for the details in a recording can be a trap we too easily fall into unless we are on our guard.

Tonal balance is the key.

Without correct tonal balance, no judgments about the details of the recording have any real value. 

A case in point: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic Records pressing gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar lacks the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word “detail,” since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful detail. Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind, along with scores of audiophile pressings. 

The MoFi guys and the CD guys are constantly falling into the trap of being impressed by the phony detail in some recordings.

The solution is to get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is have systems that are sure to fall apart at louder levels. If the sound of your system on your best pressings doesn’t get better as it gets louder, you are failing one of the most important tests in all of audio, the turn up your volume test.

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The Scientific Method in a Nutshell, Courtesy of Richard Feynman

An Experimental Approach to Finding Better Records Is the Only One that Works

Experimenting with records is the best way to learn about them. Hot Stamper shootouts are simply the name we* gave to the rigorous blinded experiments we do in order to find the best sounding pressings of the albums we play.

If you haven’t run an actual experiment under controlled conditions, you may have an opinion about the sound of a given record, you may even have experts who agree with you about that record, but what you don’t have is evidence to back up anything you or anybody else says.

It’s possible that when carrying out your experiments you may have allowed yourself to be fooled, or maybe you failed in some other way to run a proper shootout,

The audio world is drowning in pretentious knowledge, the kind that has no experimental evidence to support it.

We here at Better Records do things differently. We run experiments that tell us not which pressings should sound the best, but which ones do sound the best.

Our experimental results regularly disagree with whatever it is that the conventional wisdom of the audiophile community might have predicted.

As Richard Feynman points out below, that makes us right and them wrong, at least provisionally.

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How Not to Conduct a Proper Shootout for Aqualung

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

UPDATE 2023

This commentary was probably written circa 2010 since that’s the date on Fremer’s Aqualung review, which, for those with much more tolerance for audiophile BS than I am able to muster can be found here. I’ve made a few changes to the commentary below, but most of the original text is intact.

We recently put up a Hot Stamper Aqualung that just BLEW THE DOORS OFF the CLASSIC 200g pressing. Michael Fremer may think the new reissue is the ultimate pressing, but we sure don’t. 

The Aqualung shootout on his site is priceless. He has so many silly things to say about it, let’s not waste any more time and get right to them.

His Shootout Begins

He says he “… compared Classic’s new 200g reissue with: 1) an original UK Chrysalis 2) an original American Chrysalis/Warner Brothers, 3) an original French Pink Label Island, 4) The Mobile Fidelity ½ speed mastered edition and 5) DCC’s 180g issue mastered by the team of Hoffman and Gray.”

How many of each? One, right? (All the articles in front of the nouns are singular. Assuming MF is using good grammar, how many could there be?)

Mikey, that’s your first mistake.

When it comes to the domestic release, one is a wholly inadequate sample size for pressings that were pumped out by the millions and therefore mastered multiple times. Go to Discogs if you want to see just how many different stamper numbers can be found in the original Reprise pressings. Hint: it’s a lot. Some of them are known to us to be awful, some fall into the middle of the pack, and some we like. Figuring out which are which has taken us a lifetime of work and is well beyond the ability of any single person to decode for more than a few dozen records.

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Classic Records and Begged Questions

Hot Stamper Living Stereo Orchestral Titles Available Now

A typical review of a Classic Records classical release here on the blog might read more or less as follows:

Classic Records ruined this album, as anyone who has played a sampling of their classical reissues would have expected.

Their version is dramatically more harsh and aggressive than the Shaded Dogs we’ve played, with transistory shrill string tone and almost none of the sweetness, richness and ambience that the best RCA pressings have in such abundance.

In fact, their pressing is just plain awful, like most of the classical recordings they remastered, and should be avoided at any price. 

With every improvement we’ve made to our system over the years, Classic’s remastered classical offerings have managed to sound progressively worse. How could that be, you ask?

Because higher quality playback stops hiding the shortcomings of bad sounding records.

At the same time, and much more importantly, better audio reveals more and more of the strengths of good sounding records.

Begging the Question

But what actually is a good record? Don’t I have to offer some evidence for what causes a record to be good rather than simply asserting that the original is good and the Heavy Vinyl reissue is bad (or at least worse)?

Luckily for you, dear reader, you are actually on a blog that has much to say about these issues.

The main reason we feel qualified to make these judgments is that we make sure to play the records we review under rigorously controlled conditions in what amounts to “blinded” experiments. (Certainly as blinded as is practical.)

And our approach to finding the best sounding pressings for any given album has gone through a host of changes over the course of decades in order to allow us to carry out this difficult work. Work we actually enjoy doing.

It’s also the kind of work that practically nobody else does.

And certainly no one does it at anything approaching the scale of our efforts, with a full time staff and a monthly record purchasing budget in the tens of thousands of dollars.

An amazingly good stereo set up in a heavily-treated room with clean electricity doesn’t hurt either.

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How Did Columbia Make So Many Great Sounding Records Without Today’s Obviously Superior Mastering Equipment?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

When I play Columbia recordings from the 50s and 60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles Davis and other jazz giants, what I find most striking about them is how natural, warm and sweet they sound.

I was playing an old mono Ellington record a while back, and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing.

Those guys — the engineers and the musicians — knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how many of the best sounding records in the world managed to be recorded without the benefit of any of that stuff.

RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos.  Decca didn’t need it.

Contemporary Records managed to record many of the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great records get made with such bad equipment?

I guess we’ll never know.

Columbia may not have always recorded the best “serious” jazz, but they were very serious about the sound of their jazz. Outside of Contemporary, Columbia has better sounding jazz records than any other label of which I am aware.

Recordings made at their 30th Street Studio are pretty hard to beat. There is no Heavy Vinyl reissue on the planet that can compete with the sound of one of our Hot Stamper pressings of any of the albums recorded there you see available on our site, and they are guaranteed to knock your socks off or your money back.

And the Brubeck albums recorded by Fred Plaut are some of the most amazing sounding of all the Columbias, something few audiophiles would dispute. (Try to get the early pressings in stereo. Nothing can touch them. If you can’t afford our prices, we are more than happy to help you find your own. )

UPDATE 2025

We have two new lists for those who would like to know which Columbia label pressings win shootouts — one for 6-Eye Label winners and one for 360 Label winners.

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What to Do When Early Warner Bros. Pressings Have Bad Sound

More Label Advice for Audiophiles

There are a lot of Green Label Warner Bros. records from the 60s and 70s that sound dark, murky, recessed and so on.

The shortcomings we list below are hardly exhaustive but they should help you make a good start. Click on any link to see the pressings we have identified with that specific problem.

But the later label LPs are rarely any better and more often than not much, much worse. When you play most of them, it’s obvious that their mastering engineers have gone overboard in cleaning up the murk, leaving a sound that is lean, flat and modern — in other words, unmusical, inappropriate and more often than not disastrous.

But don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of good ones. On this blog we’ve taken the time to identify the Green Label Warner Bros. records with the potential to win shootouts. (Potential is the key word in that sentence.)

Finding the right balance of fullness and clarity may not be easy, but for most Warner Bros. albums it can be done. It’s what we get paid to do, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same thing at home as long as you make sure to follow our approach.

That Old Record Sound

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

The average record we play tends to suffer from some of these faults. It might be:

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that were stamped out over the last seven decades with no concern for sound quality.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless — relatively speaking of course — the average record will show itself to be.

Average records don’t sound like our amazingly good shootout winning copies, but they look just like them, and that’s what makes finding them so difficult. For classical and orchestral music, the effort required must be seen as the work of a lifetime.

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Yes, For Some Records There Is Only One Set of Magic Stampers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music on Island Records Available Now

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Catch Bull at Four shootouts.

We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing in 2016, a copy took the recording to a level we had no idea could even be possible. (We were going to give it Four Pluses, and probably should have, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Since then we have had many copies come in, but none that could compete with the Magic Stamper pressings.

And the best part of this story is that, no, the best stampers are not 1U, or 2U, or even 3U.

As a matter of fact, they are far from the stampers found on the earliest pressings. That’s one reason it took us so long to discover them, because they are much less commonly found than pressings with the earlier stampers. By the time these later pressings were mastered, pressed and released, the album’s biggest selling days were over.

For all we know this cutting may have been done just to keep the record in print, possibly undertaken many years after its initial release.

Who knows? Who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, it does serve to make a point near and dear to our hearts: that the idea (and operational premise of most record collectors) that the originals are always better is just a load of bunk. It might be and it might not be.

If you want better sounding records, you had better open your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressings.

These, for starters, and there are hundreds more you can read about here on the blog.

Of course this is nothing but bad news for the average audiophile collector, who simply does not have the time or money to go through the hassle of buying, cleaning and playing every pressing he can get his hands on.

But good news for us, because we do.

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Chicago and The Hottest Sounding Vinyl – Are You a Thrillseeker Too?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

I want to hear the music I love playing louder and sounding better, with more energy and excitement, and the reason I spent an ungodly number of hours over the last 40+ 50+ years working on my stereo is that the kind of sound that can give me thrills doesn’t happen by accident.

You have to work your ass off to get it.

And spend a lot of money.

And search for those pressings that have the sound you are looking for.

And be very lucky.

I don’t play records to sip wine and smoke cigars. I play records to feel something.

Whether the music is rock, jazz or classical, I want to feel the power of the music just as you would feel it at the live event.

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Labels, Patterns and Reasoning in a Circle

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Music Available Now

This commentary was written more than ten years ago. It seems to be holding up just fine though, especially considering just how bad some of the Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played recently sounded.

RFR1/ 2.  This pressing has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND.

Here is the sound that Mercury is famous for: immediate, dynamic and spacious. This record lives up to the Mercury claim: You immediately feel as though you are in the Living Presence of the orchestra.

This is precisely the kind of record that Speakers Corner would not have a clue how to master. I’d stake my reputation on it, for what that’s worth.

As you may know, I am a critic of the new [now long in the tooth] Speakers Corner Mercury series, and I can tell you without ever hearing their version of this recording that there is NO CHANCE IN THE WORLD they will ever cut a record that sounds like this.

It’s alive in a way that none of their pressings would even begin to suggest.

If you don’t believe me, please buy this record and play it for yourself. If you don’t agree, I will refund your money and pay the domestic shipping back.

This record also gives the lie to those who think that Vendor pressings are inferior. This is a Vendor and I would be surprised if there’s a better sounding copy than this one. I’ve certainly never heard one.

People who like to read labels and find some sort of pattern or connection between the label and the sound of the record are living in a world of their own making.

A world that exists solely in their heads.

The stamper numbers are the only thing that can possibly mean anything on a record, and even those are subject to so much variation from pressing to pressing that they become little more than a vague, general guide.

This LP is a good example of a record that a certain kind of record collector might pass up, hoping to find a better sounding non-Vendor pressing.

Of course, the circular reasoning that would result is that such a collector would buy the non-Vendor pressing, possibly with the exact same stamper numbers, hear how good it sounded, and congratulate himself on the fact that the non-Vendor pressings always sound so much better.

All without ever having done a comparison. A good way to never be wrong.

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