More Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Quality Sound
UPDATE
2007 was a long time ago, so please take that into condideration when reading this review.
This is a practically brand new UHQR JVC test record.
I’m SHOCKED at how good this record sounds.
It has AMAZING live jazz sound.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Mozart Available Now
One of the better Speakers Corner Deccas. When they released this title on Heavy Vinyl in 1998, it became one of the few Speakers Corner classical recordings we carried and recommended.
We knew it sounded good, but up until recently [recently being 2010 or so], when we started collecting and playing the better vintage Deccas and Londons, we sure didn’t know it could sound as good as the best of those pressings do.
Below are some thoughts from a recent classical listing that we hope will shed light on our longstanding aversion to the sound of these modern remasterings.
Transparency
What is lost in these newly remastered recordings? Lots of things, but the most obvious and bothersome is TRANSPARENCY.
Modern records are just so damn opaque. We can’t stand that sound. It drives us crazy. Important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found. That audiophiles as a group — including those that pass themselves off as champions of analog in the audio press — do not notice these failings does not speak well for either their equipment or their critical listening skills.
It is our contention that no one alive today is capable of making records that sound as good as the vintage ones we sell.
UPDATE 2025
The guy who cut this pressing sometime this century did a great job — it sounds like a vintage record, and better than any of the vintage pressings of the title we have ever played — but we don’t know who it is because he wasn’t credited on the jacket for his mastering!
Perhaps we should be more clear and say that it is the Big Name mastering engineers who can’t seem to cut a good record these days,
Once you hear our Hot Stamper pressings, those 180 gram records you own may never sound right to you again. They sure don’t sound right to us, but we are in the enviable position of being able to play the best properly-cleaned older pressings (reissues included) side by side with the newer ones.
This allows the faults of the current reissues to become much more recognizable, to the point of actually being quite obvious. When you can hear the different pressings that way, head to head, there really is no comparison. (more…)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cannonball Adderley Available Now
Soon after the album was released in 2000, we wrote the following short review (three words!) in our catalog:
“Outstanding! Top recommendation!”
Ten years or so later, we added this caveat:
A fairly good Speakers Corner jazz album. Hard to know what we would think of this pressing today, but for the thirty bucks you might pay for it, it’s probably worth a listen.
Well, we recently got one in and gave it that listen. Shockingly, it has held up fairly well for a Heavy Vinyl pressing.
With the mono switch out (inactive) on the EAR 324P, we noted:
Big, loose bass.
Horns are rich and nice but veiled.
With the mono switch in (active), the sound is a bit less veiled but not too different.
It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with a grade of 1.5+, it might qualify for our good, not great sounding LPs section, depending on how side two sounds. We didn’t play side two because 1.5+ is not a grade that makes us want to put any more time into it. It’s our lowest Hot Stamper grade, and it barely qualified for it, meaning there is a good chance that the next one could be 1+ and not worth anybody’s trouble.
The right vintage pressings are a big step up in class sonically, but boy are they hard to find in clean condition. We’ve tried for years and don’t have much to show for our efforts yet.
At a cheap price it’s not a bad record, depending on how you feel about the midrange being veiled.
I can’t stand that sound myself, but since a very large percentage of Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve auditioned over the years have suffered from that problem to one degree or another, I guess other music lovers and audiophiles feel differently. (This link will take you to some of the other records we’ve reviewed with veiled sound.)
The average copy on Discogs sells for $29.10. That seems like a decent price for a decent-sounding record.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now
Sonic Grade: B
The last time I played this record was probably in the mid-2000s. Not sure what I would think of it now. Probably not much. Back in those days we thought it was a reasonably good sounding pressing, but it’s doubtful we had ever heard an exceptionally good version of the album, as it would be years before we managed to do our first shootout for it. To see what we have to say about the record now, please click here.
Our review from many years ago:
I played this when it came out, and I have to hand it to the new MOFI, they did a great job with this one. It sounds better than I’ve ever heard it, and KILLS the old MoFi vinyl, which is the version we did the shootout with.
It was a short comparison, as in, no comparison. The earlier MoFi Half Speed (a different master tape, but still…) has that classic MoFi midrange suckout this awful label is famous for, so that Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.
More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
The Speakers Corner pressing earned something like a “B’ grade from us, which makes it one of the better releases on that label. (I would guess that one or two out of ten would rate a “B.” I also don’t know of any record of theirs that rates a higher grade than “B.”)
It’s overly rich, a case of being too fat in the mid-bass, but otherwise it mostly sounds right.
As you may already know, we stopped carrying Heavy Vinyl pressings of any kind in 2011.
By then, the quality of our playback and record cleaning had improved to the point that even the best Heavy Vinyl LPs were no longer competitive with the vintage vinyl we were then offering as Hot Stamper pressings.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now
Here’s a thought: if 180 gram records are supposed to be an improvement over the original pressings, why is it that they NEVER sound big and bold like our best Hot Stamper pressings?
And I do mean never; I’ve played hundreds of them over the years and have yet to hear this kind of sound on any of them. At this point I would have to conclude that it is simply not possible.
If you have big speakers, a large listening room and like to play your records loud, there is no modern reissue that will ever give you the thrill that a vintage pressing like this can. (Of course, to fully appreciate the effect it obviously helps if you have a White Hot Stamper copy to play.)
Heavy Vinyl
Years ago, about the time that I was becoming disenchanted with Heavy Vinyl in general and Four Men With Beards in particular, that label released a modern reissue of the album. I could never work up the energy to bother to play it. The chances of it sounding like one of our Hot Stamper pressings are slim to none and much closer to none.
UPDATE 2024
I have now played the remastered Shoot Out the Lights and it’s very good! It might be at best a low level Hot Stamper, maybe 1.5+, but for Heavy Vinyl that is indeed exceptional.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now
There is one obvious and somewhat bothersome fault with this new pressing of Sweet Baby James, an EQ issue. Anybody care to guess what it is? Send us an email if you think you know.
Hint: it’s the kind of thing that sticks out like a sore thumb, the kind of obvious EQ error I can’t ever recall hearing on an original pressing, as bad as many of those tend to be.
Our review for the Steve Hoffman remastered pressing follows.
This Warner Brothers 180g LP is the BEST SOUNDING Heavy Vinyl reissue to come our way in a long long time. Those of you who’ve been with us for a while know that that’s really not saying much, but it doesn’t make it any less true either, now does it? Let’s look at what it doesn’t do wrong first.
It doesn’t sound opaque, compressed, dry and just plain dead as a doornail like so many new reissues do. It doesn’t have the phony modern mastering sound we hate about the sound of the new Blue. (We seem to be pretty much alone in not liking that one, and we’re proud to say we still don’t like it.)
The new Sweet Baby James actually sounds like a — gulp — fairly decent original.
The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equalled by an audiophile pressing like this. (It hasn’t happened yet and we remain skeptical of the possibility.) Considering that this pressing is sure to beat most reissues, imports and such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.
Hoffman and Gray can take pride in this Sweet Baby James.
It’s some of the best work I’ve heard from them to date. If more DCC and Heavy Vinyl reissues sounded like this, we wouldn’t be so critical of them. Unfortunately they don’t, and there are scores of pages of commentary on the site to back up that statement for those of you interested in the subject.
The real thing can’t be beat, but this gets you a lot closer to the sound of the real thing than most of the Heavy Vinyl we’ve heard. I would say it easily qualifies for a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten ranking. We don’t actually have a Heavy Vinyl Top Ten List, but if we ever make one up, expect to see this record on it.
What to Listen For
As a general rule, Sweet Baby James, like most Heavy Vinyl pressings, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:
Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.
More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Somehow we managed to have a Classic Records pressing on hand to play in our most recent shootout for the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.
We knew all the way back in 1997 that Classic had done a good job with the record — we recommended it as one of the best Classic Records pressings in our catalogs at the time — but we sure didn’t expect it to do as well as it did, earning 2 pluses on one side and close to that on the other.
Years ago we wrote:
Here is the kind of sound that Classic Records could not ignore, even though the original was only ever made available as part of RCA’s budget reissue series, Victrola.
Don’t let its budget status fool you — this pressing puts to shame most of what came out on the full price Living Stereo label. (And handily beats any Classic Records reissue ever made.)
The top and bottom are wrong to varying degrees on both sides of the Classic, as you can see from our notes, which read:
Our (Incomplete) List of Potentially Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings
It has finally come to pass. A modern pressing has won a shootout.
Having auditioned more than a dozen modern (post-2000) OJC pressings and having had them fall far short of the mark again and again — when they weren’t just plain awful — we have now discovered one that can win a shootout.
As you imagine, this came as quite a shock.
We weren’t sure precisely which of the many OJC pressings our shootout winner was until we looked up the stamper numbers on Discogs. To our surprise, it had clearly been made sometime in the the 21st century.
That Never Happens
This has never happened before. No record made since 2000 has ever won a shootout against a vintage pressing of the same title.
Modern records range from awful to very good, but one quality they have never had is the ability to be the best of the best.
Now one has.