*Experimenting with Records

Experimenting with records is the only way to learn much about them of any real value.

The Yellow Submarine Songtrack Did Not Float My Boat

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Last year a customer wrote to tell me how much he liked the sound of his 2004 Japanese DMM pressing of the Yellow Submarine Songtrack.

After looking into the background of this album, we saw right from the start that it had three strikes against it.

First off, we rarely like Japanese pressings outside of those that were recorded in Japan, such as the direct to disc jazz and classical records we’ve done shootouts for. Other Japanese pressings we like were recorded in the states for the Japanese market: the jazz direct to discs on East Wind come to mind.

Secondly, we avoid DMM pressings whenever possible. They often add what seems to us like digital artifacts to the sound.

And lastly, we rarely like modern remixes, especially modern remixes that obviously use digital processes of various kinds. The remixed Abbey Road is a complete disaster. Nothing that comes out of Abbey Road these days should be expected to sound good. Their work is a disgrace.

So rather than buy the Japanese-pressed version of the album, we cheaped out and just bought a UK one for half the price.

We half-expected the worst and that’s pretty much what we found.

I used to sell this very version of the album back in 1999 when it came out. I thought it sounded just fine.

That was about twenty years ago. My all tube system was darker and dramatically less resolving than the one I have now.

Scores of improvements have been made since then to every aspect of analog reproduction, something we discuss endlessly on this blog.

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A Random Copy of 52nd Street Tells You What, Exactly?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Sonic Grade:

Side One: F / Side Two: C+

The Impex (Cisco) 180 gram remastering of 52nd Street was cut by Kevin Gray, under the direction of Robert Pincus (aka Mr Record), at the now defunct AcousTech Mastering in Camarillo. We noted the following in a recent review for a much superior (how could it not be?) Hot Stamper pressing:

Side one is a joke (not much ambience, resolution, energy, etc.) but side two is actually quite good. Side two fixes the biggest problem with the album: hard, honky vocals.

In his review appearing in The Absolute Sound, Neil Gader plucks two songs out of the album’s nine as especially worthy of praise. Oddly enough they’re both on side two. If I didn’t know the album as well as I do, I might wonder why. 

In our review we went on to say:

But at a cost. It still sounds like a modern record, with not much in the way of space, transparency, richness, resolution and the like. You know, all that ANALOG stuff that old dinosaurs like us like our records to have.

For those of you who have thirty three dollars to spend, you could do a lot worse on side two. Side one is pretty bad and you would have a hard time doing worse.

Allow me to now quote Mr. Gader from The Absolute Sound, October 2011, Issue 216, Pg. 129

The Impex 180-gram remastering by Kevin Gray is superb. It replaces the spongy timing and dull top of the original Columbia LP with expansive space and sharp details. Its vivid and brightened treble is welcome compared to the warm but smothered original. Listen for Joel’s doubled harmonies, the pennywhistle in “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” and the burning horn section in “Half a Mile Away,” and you’ll hear what a difference a great remastering makes.

Mr. Gader has a bad original pressing, and like most reviewers he makes the mistake of assuming that other originals, and probably all the originals, perforce sound like his. Speaking from experience, they most assuredly do not. We will not be addressing his specific complaints in this commentary for one simple reason.

Nothing in his review describes the sound of the best copies. 

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Which Is More Important – The Label or the Stamper Numbers?

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

In this case, since the label is different but the stampers are the same, it’s the label that tells you how good your pressing may — heavy accent on the may — sound.

Lately we’ve been having exceptionally good luck with the early label pressings of many of the London violin concerto records we’ve done shootouts for, especially those performed by Ruggiero Ricci.

However, the notes you see below do not belong to the wonderful Sibelius record pictured here.

They belong to another London record. We give out lots of bad stampers on this blog, but almost never do we give out the good ones. (When we do give out the best stampers, we usually keep the title a mystery, as is the case of the record here. To see the other titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list to date is short but not to worry, more are on their way.)

The amazingly good sounding pressing on the early label took the recording to another level. Our shootout notes read:

  • Amazing violin sound and performance.
  • Very dynamic and realistic.
  • So much subtlety.

Scroll down to see out Key Takeaways from this shootout.

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It Only Took Us Six Years to Find Another Killer Copy of Down In L.A.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Our comments about our Hot Stamper winner from 2019 appear below.

Note that we could not even find White Hot sound on either side, and side two, at 1+, does not even qualify as a Hot Stamper these days, which means it would never be offered for sale on the site.

This was a tough shootout!

We had a lot more research and development to do, and six years later we had the killer copy to prove that it could be done. In 2025, we found a pressing that made it all worthwhile.

This is one of the BEST copies we’ve played in many years, close to five I would guess. Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Hippie Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre. It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars. The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul. (more…)

Symphonie Fantastique – Three Mastering Options

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we played a reissue of the title you see pictured which prompted us to make some observations and ask some questions about the approach the mastering engineer might have taken.

And this one comes complete with the bonus 7″ entitled “Berlioz Takes a Trip,” in which Bernstein explores the work “with musical illustrations by the New York Philharmonic.”

Clocking in at around 45 minutes, Symphonie Fantastique is a difficult work to fit onto a single LP,  which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record:

  1. Compress the dynamics,
  2. Lower the level, or
  3. Filter the deep bass.

On this side two it seems that none of those approaches were taken by the engineer who cut this record in the early 80s — there’s plenty of bass, as well as powerful dynamics, and the levels seem fine.

How he do it? Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.

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Black, Green, Yellow, Orange – Which Contemporary Label Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We’ve learned a lot about this amazing sounding record over the last twenty years. Check out the latest updates.

Our Hot Stamper commentary from a long-ago shootout we’d done for the wonderful Helen Humes album Songs I Like to Sing discusses the sonic characteristics we find most commonly associated with the various Contemporary labels.

This Contemporary Black Label Original LP has that classic tube-mastered sound — warmer, smoother, and sweeter than the later pressings, with more breath of life. Overall the sound is well-balanced and tonally correct from top to bottom, which is rare for a black label Contemporary, as they are usually dull and bass-heavy.

We won’t buy them locally anymore unless they can be returned. I’ve got a box full of Contemporarys with bloated bass and no top end that I don’t know what to do with.

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written a long time ago. There are no boxes full of Contemporary records laying around in the back room. The ones that don’t sound good were sold off years ago.

Like most mediocre-to-bad sounding records we’ve auditioned, they just sit in a box taking up space. All of our time and effort goes into putting good pressings on the site and in the mailings. It’s hard to get motivated to do anything with the leftovers. We paid plenty for them, so we don’t want to give them away, but they don’t sound good, so most of our customers won’t buy them.

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Dopey Record Theories – Putting Bad Ideas to the Test

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

The discussion below was prompted by a stunning White Hot Stamper 2-pack that had just gone up on the site in 2018.

I implored the eventual purchaser to note that side two of record one has Joni sounding thin, hard and veiled. If you look at the stampers you can see it’s obviously cut by the same guy (no names please!), and we’re pretty sure both sides were stamped out at the same time of the day since it’s impossible to do it any other way.

What accounts for the amazing sound of one side and the mediocre sound of its reverse?

If your theory cannot account for these huge differences in sound, your theory is fatally flawed. 

Can anything be more ridiculous than the ad hoc, evidence-free theories of some audiophile record collectors desperately searching for a reason to explain why records — even the two sides of the same record — sound so different from one another?

The old adage “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” couldn’t be more apt. If you want to know if a pudding tastes good, a list of its ingredients, the temperature it was cooked at, and the name of the person stirring it on the stove is surely of limited value. To know the taste one need only take a bite.

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Paris 1917-1938 – Side One Versus Side Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This listing was written all the way back in 2012 for the first Hot Stamper pressing of SR 90435 we’d ever listed as a Hot Stamper.

Note that it only had one good side, and even that side had a serious problem.

Thirteen years later in 2025 we would do a real shootout for this wonderful recording and learn something very few audiophiles know to this day — that the best stampers and the worst stampers are sometimes the same stampers.

Our 2012 Review

Super Hot Stamper sound for Eric Satie’s wonderfully eccentric Parade (and the Auric piece as well) can be found on this rare original promo copy of Mercury SR 90435, a record that was previously on the TAS List if I’m not mistaken.

It certainly deserves to be. The sound is BIG and OPEN, and like so many Mercury recordings with the London Symphony, it’s rich and full-bodied, not thin and nasally as is so often the case with their domestically recorded releases. Above all the sound is transparent, lively and dynamic.

In many ways this album would certainly serve quite well as an audiophile Demo Disc: the timbre of the wide array of instruments used is (mostly) Right On The Money.

Check out the lengthy and humorous producer’s notes for the sessions below. And people think The Beatles discovered experimental sounds in the studio.

The Brass Lacked Weight

With one small exception: the brass doesn’t have all the weight of the real thing, and for that we have deducted one plus from our top grade of three.

Side one has classic bad Mercury sound.

So screechy, hard and thin. How many audiophiles own records like this and don’t know that the sound of one side is awful and the other brilliant?

Since so few have ever commented publicly about such matters — and even supposedly knowledgeable audiophile reviewers never bother to even bring up the subject of one side versus the other — one must conclude that this is a subject that has yet to pierce the consciousness of most of our audiophile brethren, especially the ones who haven’t yet discovered this site.

Now’s a good time to start. Dig in, you may be surprised by what you find.

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I Owe a Huge Debt of Gratitude to Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

For me, Crime of the Century worked like a gateway drug to get me addicted to the amazing soundscapes found on so many 70s Prog Rock and Art Rock recordings, although I didn’t know what the term Art Rock meant or whether it even existed yet. I surely never heard anyone use the term.

I just knew I loved Supertramp’s music. Both Crime and Crisis? What Crisis? were in heavy rotation in the cheap apartment I rented three blocks from the beach in San Diego where I was living in the mid-70s.

(It shared no common walls with any other units, which was an absolute necessity for someone who liked to play his music good and loud and often late into the evening. The police came knocking on my door once at two in the morning after I got a bit too carried away with the “running around the airport” song on Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently the next door neighbors were not enjoying it as much as I was.)

MoFi Rocks

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have had to have been Crime of the Century released by Mobile Fidelity in 1978.

It was that label’s first rock release and it showed me the kind of Big Rock Sound I didn’t think was possible for two speakers to produce no matter how big they were, and mine were very big indeed.

In my mind it sounded to me like live music at a concert. I had simply never heard sound like that in my livingroom.

Partly that was because a few years earlier I had upgraded to some very big speakers and some awesomely expensive tube gear in 1976.

When I threw that super Hi-Fi Audiophile pressing on the turntable and turned the volume up good and loud, I thought there could be no question that finally, after all these years and after so many different stereo systems, I had reached the pinnacle of home audio. How could the sound possibly get any better? (Of course, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would devote the next 40-plus years to exploring that question.)

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What Is There to Say about Mercury Sound This Good?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

In 2025 we did a shootout for the Mercury you see pictured, SR-90437, having collected a large number of copies with a wide range of stampers, which of course is always the best approach when doing a shootout for the first time. (Once you have a couple under your belt you naturally can start to focus on the pressings that do well and avoid the ones that do badly.)

In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner, we wrote:

Dorati and the LSO’s dynamic performance of these 16 Hungarian Dances debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early Mercury pressing.

These sides are doing everything right – they’re rich, clear, undistorted, open, spacious, and have depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard. You’d be hard-pressed to find a copy that’s this well balanced, yet big and lively, with such wonderful clarity in the mids and highs.

Some of the above may sound familiar. We say these sorts of things and use these stock phrases to describe many of the amazing sounding records that win our shootouts.

But aren’t these adjectives precisely the ones you should be using when a record is doing everything right? What else could you say about a record that sounds this good?

Our notes are simply the impressions a member of our listening panel wrote down as he critically listened to the record while it was playing.

In this case, his attention was being drawn to the marvelous qualities a large scale orchestral recording can have when everything is working at the highest levels of fidelity.

With the right playback equipment and lots of practice, you could easily find yourself listening this way and taking the same kind of notes.

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