Japanese LPs – Reviews, Commentaries, etc.

“I find myself just wanting to go back to a Hot Stamper regardless of the artist or genre.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Piano Recordings Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Gotta tip my cap to you folks. You have been blowing my mind with some amazing sound. Disc after disc. To the point where I am now having a love-hate relationship with my hot stampers due to the fact they’ve practically rendered the bulk of my 200+ record collection considerably less enjoyable to listen to.

Every time I listen to a ‘modern’ reissue now, even the good ones, I don’t necessarily dislike it—many of them are great—but they’re not the same and I find myself just wanting to go back to a hot stamper regardless of the artist or genre.

All I want is that sound. I can’t get enough of it.

I’ve got some incredible reissues too. From music matters jazz to Impex 1-steps. Lucky enough to even have a couple MMJ on their SRX vinyl as well. And boy is that quiet. Almost digital, it’s creepy. And it is great sound by today’s ‘normal’ standards.

But now that I’ve heard what kind of mind-blowing sound is actually possible, well, these are not that.

Close—and better than MANY of the alternatives—but no cigar.

The Zep II is incredible. Easily the best sounding album I now own and the crown jewel of my collection. And so quiet too. Especially compared to my other 2 RL hot mix copies I got while I was in hot pursuit of the holy grail. I love that you guys conservatively grade everything. More often than not I’ve been impressed by how much more quiet the records are than I expect them to be. As I mentioned previously this was a huge splurge for me and not something I’ll be able to do often, but now having heard it many times over it’s unequivocally worth every penny.

It occurred to me while listening to it the other night that you guys aren’t selling records. You’re selling time machines. I now possess a near infinitely-reusable ticket to go to a Led Zeppelin concert literally any time I feel like it. And I wasn’t even born yet when that was actually possible. Still trying to wrap my head around that. Could easily say the same for my Dark Side hot stamper as well.

Almost equally as exiting was to take a flier on the 45 rpm copy of The Three you all put on offer a couple weeks ago. I had never heard of the album or Joe Sample at all for that matter. I’ve since listened to the track Funky Blues easily 20+ times since I got it, to the point where I’m forcing myself to curtail my listening frequency before I cause groove damage.

This might just be my new favorite song. And it’s easily catapulted to one of my top 10 favorite albums.

The first time I heard Shelly Manne whack that snare a few seconds into the song I nearly dropped my drink. Then he did it again a few measures later and I knew I was in for a real treat. The piano is just haunting. Even the bass is unreal. I’ll stop here because I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, but thank you for this one, this is something special as well.

I love it so much I have an ask. Any chance you guys have a low grade hot stamper copy of the 33 rpm version kicking around after your last shootout? After spending 400 on the 45 I can’t justify a second copy for hundreds of dollars but I’m dying to hear the rest of the album now. I’d pull the trigger on even your lowest grade most affordable copy if you have one, just to hear the last 2 tracks. And possibly take a little wear and tear off the poor grooves of my 45 at the same time!

Anyway I’ve rambled on enough for one evening (no Zep pun intended) but did want to be sure to express my sincere gratitude for your services. You all have well-earned another loyal customer at this point. Appreciate you indulging me and look forward to many more hot stampers to come!

Best,
Carter

Carter,

Thank you very much for taking the time to write about your experiences with three of the very special records we’ve sent you. Those are amazingly good records, no question about it.

And it seems you have discovered through those three pressings what our Hot Stampers have in such abundance, and what modern records are mostly missing to their all-but-fatal detriment.

We don’t go out of our way to use many technical terms here on the blog, but since there is one that perfectly fits the quality you describe, we will look the other way and just break our longstanding rule and put it out there, simply because it has a special something that we feel perfectly describes the aspect of the sound you are hearing but not quite able to put your finger on.

The phrase you are most likely looking for is je ne sais quoi.

As the dictionary has it, there is without a doubt an appealing quality to our records that cannot be adequately described or expressed.

The appealing quality of our Hot Stamper pressings is born of many factors, most of which we do not understand.

But here’s one: our records are cleaned in such a way that the mysterious quality you speak of is brought out to an exceptional — I might go so far as to say unparalleled — degree. No other cleaning regimen of which we are aware can do what The Prelude System can do for maximum JNSQ Factor (if I may take the liberty of abbreviating the term. Easier to type that way, to be honest).

We talk about all the things we are listening for when comparing records — various aspects of the bass reproduction, the amount of midrange presence, spaciousness, etc., etc., and we write down what we are hearing in all those areas on our notes, some of which we share with our readers right here on the blog.

If you’ve ever done one of these multi-record shootouts, you know it helps to focus on the details of the recording as you listen and scribble away at your notes. It gives you something to do while the music is impressing the hell out of your eardrums and sending endorphins surging deep into your brain matter.

But what is the final grade going to be? Do you simply add up all the factors and weigh them appropriately to come up with the overall grade you then award the record? What about the JNSQ factor? How much of that goes into the final grade?

It’s really not that complicated. The best sides do everything right. The next best sides do almost everything right, falling short in one area or another, which means they typically earn grades of 2.5+, and on down the line to the Supers and those with lesser grades.

The JNSQ Factor doesn’t really seem to make that much of a difference because all the particulars are there in the sound and they all add up to a fabulous listening experience, the kind you described in your letter.

But all of the above talk about grading misses the point entirely.

The JNSQ factor is the thing that vintage pressings have in spades and modern pressings are mostly missing. They are the mysterious, unnameable heart and soul of vintage vinyl. They are the main reason your new records don’t feel right even when they mostly sound right.

How it came to be that mass-produced records from 50 to 75 years ago often have all the magic of the music encoded in their grooves and new records rarely do is a mystery no one seems to be able to answer. We certainly can’t.

But we know it when we hear it.

And if we hear it, there must be something to it, and if there is something to it, that thing is going to need a name.

Je ne sais quoi works as well as any other, so we’ll go with that one for now if it’s all the same to you.

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Does It Seem to You That This Guy Knows Much About Dark Side of the Moon?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

It doesn’t to me, but I admit to some bias when it comes to Dark Side of the Moon. I must have played more than a hundred different pressings over the last forty-odd years.

Year after year I was sure I understood exactly which copies had the best sound, and again and again I was proved wrong. (To be clear, I proved myself wrong. Shootouts have a way of doing that.)

We only found out what the best sounding versions were about five or six years ago [make that ten]. We did that by doing shootout after shootout with every version we could lay our hands on, starting around 2005. We even did a shootout for two different Mobile Fidelity pressings many years ago, which we think makes for some good reading to this day.

It’s especially good reading for those who don’t appreciate how dramatic pressing variations can be for even quality controlled limited editions. The comparison of the two MoFi’s centers around the idea that midrange tonality is by far the most important quality to listen for on Dark Side, and that, surprisingly to some audiophiles, but obviously not to us, there are MoFi pressings with a correct midrange and there are some without.

Is this fellow listening for midrange tonality? If you watch the video and he says he is, then you can let me know!  And if not, you can ask him in the comments why he wasn’t. Maybe he just likes the chiming clocks and the deep bass of the heartbeat.

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Are You a Soundphile? I Used to Be One

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

About 30 years ago I got hold of a Japanese pressing of Marriner conducting Haydn’s Toy Symphony and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and was blown away by the absolutely phenomenal quality of the Haydn. Listing the record for sale, I raved:

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is the best sounding Toy Symphony you will ever hear!

…all the little toys that play along with the music just JUMP out of the speakers. The recording is so transparent and the toys are so well miked it’s like hearing the work for the first time, or live.

Now we know definitively that this is clearly not true, assuming yoy have one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the EMI original. They are better in every way than the Japanese pressing, which is the one purporting to have audiophile sound.

If this sounds familiar to you, I’m guessing this is not your first visit to the blog or our site. There is almost always a vintage pressing with superior sound when compared to the audiophile pressings made from the same recording.

The problem is: You just don’t know which vintage pressing will have superior sound. Maybe they all will. Maybe none of the copies you own will. There is one, but how do you find it?

In order to get that answer, you have to know how to do carefully controlled shootouts, and not just once, but more often than not a number of them over a period of years. Whatever answer you may come up will most likely be provisional, not definitve, because that’s the only way the process of discovery can work when applying scientific methodologies to the solution of a problem like “which pressings sound best on record X?”.

We did the shootout in 2022 and found out that the best of the original EMI pressings are quite a bit better, a classic case of live and learn, as well as one of the hundreds of breakthrough discoveries we’ve made over the years. That’s what happens when you are in the business of playing records and then selling the best of them to audiophiles looking for superior sound.

I believe I had at least one or two UK EMI pressings to play against the Japanese ones, but all the details of how I came to this conclusion — a proto-shootout, carried out long before I knew how to do a real one — are lost to the mists of time.

Keep in mind that my stereo was dramatically less revealing back then. Also I had not learned how to clean records properly. Those two facts, combined with the underdeveloped listening skills that go with them, helped me to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

No, the Japanese pressing, specifically targeted to audiophiles, or “soundphiles” if you like, is not superior to a properly mastered and pressed UK LP.

If you have more than a handful of Japanese pressings in your collection, you can be sure that there is still plenty of room for improvement in your audio system.

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Letter of the Week – “…never heard the details in the guitars and cymbals and keyboards like this.”

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

One of our best customers, Roger, received his $150 Hot Stamper [those were the days!] ’Wish You Were Here’ and went straight to work comparing it with the various other pressings he owned: two different CBS Half Speeds. The not-so-shocking results are presented in detail below.

Hi Tom,

I received your Pink Floyd ‘Wish You Were Here’ Hot Stamper and compared it to my CBS Half-Speed (I found a bunch of these Half-Speeds in a bargain bin years ago and did a shootout to select the best one) and the pressing that I considered the best, the Japanese Mastersound Half-Speed, for which I paid dearly.

Drum roll, please while Vanna hands me the sealed envelope………… and the winner is: Surprise — the Hot Stamper!

And it wasn’t even close.

Once I heard the center-of-the-earth bass on the Hot Stamper ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, it was all over. I was amazed at how bright the CBS was, transparent yes, but bright and no bass and no body to the saxophones and voices. The Mastersound was better-balanced in that the highs were tamed, but no real dynamics and the bass was flabby.

I have heard this record hundreds of times, but never heard the details in the guitars and cymbals and keyboards like this.

And did I mention the huge, huge soundstage with a wall of sound like that of other Pink Floyd records? Nice job as usual.

Roger,

Thanks for verifying the accuracy of our Hot Stamper claims once again. The decent sounding Half Speed Mastered records, CBS and otherwise, can be counted pretty easily on one’s fingers. We could debunk them all day long if we wanted to (and had ten times the staff). It doesn’t take long to hear how anemic the sound is compared to The Real Thing, the real thing being, of course, a vintage pressing.

The copy you bought was rated A Plus on both sides, two full sonic grades below the best, so you can imagine how good those copies sound. But since neither you nor I are made out of money, for $150 you now own a copy that will trounce anything you throw at it, especially if what you throw at it is an audiophile pressing.

Those moribund LPs belong on Ebay where all the Technics turntable owners of the world can find them in order to complete their — let’s be honest — silly and ultimately pointless audiophile collections.

Modern equipment shows half-speed foolishness for what it is. You heard it, we heard it, and slowly but surely we are spreading the word to the rest of the audiophile community.

Thanks again. It’s a big job and we need all the help we can get.

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Compromised Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different in those days. A few dozen had been done starting in 2004, and probably not nearly as well as they should have been, truth be told.

This was unexplored territory, a new world. At the time we had no way of knowing how much there was to learn and how much time and effort would go into learning it.

Thousands of shootouts later we have a pretty firm grip on how to go about finding the best sounding pressings of the greatest music ever pressed on vinyl. Those recordings, with sound that is dramatically superior to those that have come along since, are why this blog exists. (The blog also allows me to promote 100+ personal favorites that I think should be more popular with my fellow audiophiles.)

Our Story, Circa 2006

Years ago one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few truly amazing sounding direct discs that offered music actually worth listening to. This was an actively touring big band, not a group of studio cats trying to make a record out of some charts somebody managed to cook up.

And you can read all about the killer copy we discovered a few years back here, complete with our shootout notes. (The notes can also be seen at the bottom of this post.)

Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. (For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how one goes about acquiring them.)

Hot Stamper pressings of jazz or popular music are almost always going to be multi-track, tape recordings with plenty of overdubbing and processing, about as far from purist live-in-the-studio performances recorded directly to disc as you can get.

They will invariably suffer a great many compromises, especially when compared to the approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate all sources of distortion in the pursuit of higher fidelity. In the case of direct to disc recordings, this means the losses that result from the use of analog tape.

But when they do that, they almost always fail.

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A 45 RPM Audiophile Pressing to Put Them All to Shame

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Prokofiev Available Now

This Japanese 45 RPM remastering of our favorite recording of Prokofiev’s wonderful Lt. Kije Suite has DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND. For starters, there are very few records with dynamics comparable to these. Since this is my favorite performance of all time, I can’t recommend the record any more highly. 

Most of what’s “bad” about a DG recording from 1978 is ameliorated with this pressing. The bass drum (drums?) here must be heard to be believed. We know of no Golden Age recording with as believable a presentation of the instrument as this.

The drum is clearly and precisely located at the back of the stage; even better, it’s as huge and powerful and room-filling as it would have been had you attended the session yourself. That’s our idea of hi-fidelity here at Better Records.

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We Drop the Needle on Another Sad Excuse for an Audiophile Pressing

More on the Subject of Half-Speed Mastering

This is an A&M Audiophile Sampler, made in Canada and pressed on Japanese vinyl .

There is a bit of a story behind this title. It’s not the kind of record we normally would buy, or even bother to play truth be told.

A customer had emailed us saying it sounded great. It was cheap so we grabbed one for fun. Our notes read:

  • Sucked out middle
  • Clean and hard (maybe like a CD?)
  • This sucks

Hard to imagine one of our customers liked the sound of this pressing, but I assure you that one of them did, so make of that what you will.

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Letter of the Week – “To think I spent all those years playing a record that was bright and edgy, none the wiser to matrix numbers and pressing variations.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

Our good customer who goes by the handle ab_ba on the web wrote to us about his experience with the White Hot Stamper pressing of Michael Jackson’s Thriller he recently acquired.

Part one of his letter can be found here.

Here he tells us about the shootout he conducted, which included a “pricey Japanese pressing” and a pressing that the forums recommended as the “holy grail.”

A few weeks later, on the eve of the closing of the return window, I shot it out against the best of my other copies. They range from the copy I grew up with, one of the few records from childhood that I held onto, to a pricey Japanese pressing in great shape (purchased long ago, when I thought Japanese pressing were where it’s at), to some copies I’ve picked up over the years because they looked to be in good shape and they were just five bucks, and a pressing that the forums told me was the “holy grail.”

None stacked up to the white hot stamper. In fact, they really weren’t even close. Here’s what I found:

The copy I grew up with is bright and edgy. To think, I spent all those years playing and re-playing a record that was bright and edgy, none the wiser to matrix numbers and pressing variations.

Some other lucky kid back then was surely listening to the copy I now own. I wonder if he ever said to himself, “wow, there’s something about this record. It sounds really special.”

The pressing with a sought-after matrix code had phenomenal bass, but the vocals were recessed. I’d so easy to be impressed with those huge drums on Billie Jean, but that alone is not enough to tell you it’s a great pressing. A lot of pressings seem to get that right.

My Japanese pressing was clear and full. But too smooth. The guitars don’t bite. Also, it fatigued me by about halfway through the side. This is energetic music. It might exhaust you, but it doesn’t have to fatigue you. This is an example of where if you don’t have a white hot stamper to compare it to, you’ll just assume your version sounds as good as it can get.

Dear ab_ba,

Most Japanese pressings cater to the sound a mid-fi system would need to sound good and a hi-fi system would find disastrous. They are almost always made from dubbed tapes, which are then brightened up in the mastering phase since that is the sound that appeals to the Japanese market for some reason unknown to me. (Old school audio equipment — horn speakers and vintage tube electronics — would be my guess.)

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Obscured By Cloudy Japanese Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

When I was just getting up to speed in audio and exploring the world of music available on vinyl in the 70s, many of the stereo stores I frequented carried Japanese pressings. They were widely believed to have superior sound relative to their domestic counterparts — in this case, the mass-produced pressings I would see at the Tower Records right across from the Sports Arena in my hometown of San Diego. I went there at least once a week, probably more like two or three times.

Tower was far and away the best place to go record shopping in those days. The store was huge and they had dramatically more stock than Licorice Pizza or The Wherehouse.

They also had a separate section for Half-Speed mastered pressings from a number of labels, which of course was the first place in the store I would visit, digging through the bins to see what new remastered titles may have been produced for audiophiles searching for the ultimate in sound quality.

Of course, I identified as just such a person. In terms of sound quality, and with the extremely limited knowledge I had acquired at the time, I believed I set a high standard for the sound of the records I bought. I was willing — eager even, you could even say excited — to pay whatever premium price I had to for a record that was sure to deliver superior sound quality. To me, in the late 70s, that meant two things: direct to disc recordings, and Half-Speed mastered pressings.

(There was a another category of records that did not fall into the above two, best exemplified by American Grammaphone and the Fresh Aire series, but the less said about those schlocky releases the better, other than to point out that some of their titles are TAS list carryovers from HP’s time running the Super Disc list, specifically Fresh Aire 2 and 3, both best avoided.)

And, like any other open-minded individual, when it came to Japanese vinyl I was willing to give a few a spin.

However, the more of them I bought, the more clear it became to me that even the best of them sounded mediocre (veiled, smeary and dubby from second generation tapes) and more often than not they were just plain awful. (Second generation tape issues being the main problem, of course, with the additional insult of poor tonality, the result of being mastered using wacky equalization, typically with added brightness where none was needed.)

Pink Floyd

The notes for the Pink Floyd album you see below, Obscured by Clouds, were written sometime in March of 2025 as part of the shootout we conducted for the album.

If we assume it would be an audiophile who would be attracted to this pressing, perhaps for its quieter playing surfaces, perhaps operating under the assumption that the Japanese engineers mastering the record would be more likely to do a better job as well, then what we have here is a textbook case of an audiophile bullshit pressing.

One that sounds nothing like the album is supposed to, based on having played a number of exceptionally good sounding copies, all British and all on the Green Harvest label, mastered from good tapes, sometimes by the legendary Harry T. Moss. We feel we are more than qualified to make these judgments. If we can’t make them, nobody can.

Discogs allows us to glean some information regarding the desirability of this Japanese reissue with the record buying public currently in the market for Pink Floyd vinyl who register on their site.

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Breakfast in America – An A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This title is yet another Half-Speed we think belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I should know — my system in 1976 was one-tenth as revealing as the one we use now.

But this pressing is so awful even my old system could not be fooled by this kind of audiophile BS sound. The console you see pictured might be the ideal system to play it. Hard to say, I haven’t heard one of those since the 60s.

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

So washed out, brittle, thin and lifeless, it practically defies understanding that anyone with two working ears ever considered calling this piece of crap an “audiophile” record.

But are today’s remastered records marketed to those looking for superior sound any better? Not the ones we’ve played recently. (If you know of any good ones, please drop us a line.)

Is this A&M pressing the worst version of the album ever made? It’s hard to imagine it would have much competition.

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