*Arcana – Label Advice

Some of the titles listed here have better sound on labels that many record collectors would probably not assume would be the best.

Other titles have inferior sound based on the labels we’ve identified in these listings.

Keep in mind that all the practical advice you see here is based solely on the numerous experiments we’ve run and the data we’ve collected from them.

On This Rachmaninoff Title, the Right Reissues Clearly Have the Best Sound

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.

Well, now we know.

The earliest Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we offer.

We never offered the record in Hot Stamper form because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.

Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.

Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.

Did Harry have a good later pressing?

Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did?

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

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A Truly Awesome Feat of Engineering by Rhett Davies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Phil Manzanera Available Now

You may recall reading this bit about Rhett Davies‘ superb engineering on Dire Straits’ debut:

“…until something better comes along, this is his Masterpiece.

It has to be one of the best sounding rock records ever made, with Tubey Magical mids, prodigious bass, transparency and freedom from hi-fi-ishness and distortion like few rock recordings you have ever heard.”

Well, something better has now come along, and it’s called Diamond Head.

It has some of the biggest, boldest sound we have ever heard. Diamond Head isn’t known as an audiophile album but it should be — the sound is glorious — wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and as rich and dynamic as it gets.

It’s clearly a big speaker Demo Disc. Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

The best copies have room shaking deep bass with the kind of whomp that can drive this music to practically unexplored heights.

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How Do the Original UK Decca Between The Buttons LPs Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

The only version of this album that we offer has the British track listing, so don’t pick this one up if you’re looking for great sounding versions of Let’s Spend The Night Together or Ruby Tuesday.

A bummer, but the domestic copies sound awful, so what can you do?

Also, the early UK Decca label pressings have never impressed us.

Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could possibly tolerate that kind of sound nowadays?

The early Deccas might be passable on the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s, but they are much too unpleasant to be played on the high quality modern equipment we use.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Suites for Solo Cello on the Later Label – Ouch!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2021

The discussion here is for a Oval label copy of Suites for Solo Cello (SR 90370) we reviewed in 2010. These days the Oval label pressings from the early 60s almost never sound very good to us. We no longer buy them and we certainly don’t bother to put them in shootouts.

This record on the Oval Label would be very unlikely to qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing anymore, although we liked it just fine in 2010, as you can see from our old review.

In 2024 we actually put an Oval Label pressing of SR 90370 in a shootout and it did about as poorly as we would have expected. What a waste of time and money. Never again.

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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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In the Court of the Crimson King – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now

If you have the Atlantic pressing, from any era, you have not yet begun to hear this record at its best. The better sounding domestic originals we’ve played are clearly mastered from copy tapes, which results in dubby sound.

In the Court of the Crimson King is such a well recorded album that even the sound quality derived from second-generation tapes is still better than most of what came out in 1969.

(By the way, 1969 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2026 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to play. To make it easier for audiophiles to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve also identified more than 25 Rock and Pop albums essential to any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.)

Now on to brass tacks.

UK Polydor Label

Passable, not really worth the labor to put them in a shootout just to have them earn sub-Hot Stamper grades. A1/B5 is a common stamper for these pressings and with those stampes the Polydor is not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.

Pink Label Island

The same can be said for some of the earliest UK Pink Label Island pressings. None of them has ever won a shootout and probably none of them ever will. (A number of Pink Label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)

The conventional wisdom which holds that original pressings are superior to reissues in this case turns out to be flat wrong.

The Pink Label pressings can be good, but we rarely buy them, our two best reasons being:

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Rossini Overtures – Reissues Versus Originals

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

The London and Decca original pressings of Decca’s recordings are the best sounding, right?

Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

We were a bit surprised that some of the (expensive) originals didn’t sound very good to us in recent shootouts.

Bad vinyl, bad mastering, who knows why so many early copies suffer from thick, dull and veiled sound? 

The Stereo Treasury pressing of Maag’s 1958 recording you see here is shockingly good in many ways. It sure doesn’t sound like a budget reissue.

If anything it sounds more original than the originals we played against it!

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the benefit of mastering by means of the modern cutting equipment of the mid- to late- ’60s. (We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of many years ago, not the bad modern mastering of today.)

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title, as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these Super Hot or better sides.

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An Overview of Beatles Oldies But Goldies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is a Beatles album we think we know well.

We’ve done a number of shootouts for A Collection of Beatles Oldies over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the sound of the originals vis-a-vis the reissues:

  1. The best of the early pressings always win our shootouts. No reissue has ever earned our top grade of A+++ and it is unlikely any reissue ever will.
  2. The reissues can be quite good however. The best of them have earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
  3. The worst of the early pressings also earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
  4. Conclusion: if you have a bad original and a good reissue, you might be fooled into thinking the sound quality was comparable.

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Sgt. Pepper on Yellow and Black Parlophone

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2010, prompted by our good fortune in finding a clean, -1/-1 original pressing of Sgt. Pepper, at a local record store, in stereo no less.

Since that time I believe we have played at least one other early pressing. We are unlikely to play another.

The originals have almost nothing in common with the amazing pressings that end up winning our shootouts, none of which have ever been mastered in the 60s to the best of my knowledge, although it is possible that ten or fifteen years ago, before we really got to know the record the way we know it now, there might have been one or two from that decade.

Since then the cutoff is somewhere in the mid-70s. We leave the specific years for you to figure out.

Of course, if you bought a White Hot Stamper copy from us, you know at least one of the stampers for at least one of the sides that wins a shootout, and perhaps both if you happened to have purchased a 3/3 Top Shelf copy. (At the time of this writing there are a total of seven on the site, out of about 500 records. Needless to say, they are very hard to find.)

Certainly nothing from 1967 and nothing on the original label.

And definitely nothing in mono.

We had the opportunity not long ago to audition a very clean original early pressing of the album and were frankly quite taken aback by how just plain AWFUL it was in every respect. No top end above 8k or so, flabby bass, muddy mids — this was as far from Hot Stamper sound as you could get.

To be fair, we have played exactly one copy on our current system. (Played an early copy or two long ago but on much different equipment, so any judgments we might have made are highly suspect.) Perhaps there are good ones. We have no way of knowing whether there are, and we are certainly not motivated to find out given the price that original Sgt. Pepper’s pressings on the Yellow and Black label in audiophile playing condition are fetching these days.

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We Don’t Offer Domestic Pressings of Pour Down Like Silver for One Very Simple Reason

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

In spite of the fact that the domestic pressings of this Richard and Linda Thompson classic from 1974 were mastered by the likes of Kendun and Sterling — two of the greatest mastering houses of all time, — they have never impressed us with their sound quality.

The biggest problems with this record would be obvious to even the casual listener: gritty, spitty vocals; lack of richness; bright tonality; lack of bass; no real space or transparency, etc.

The domestic Island pressings did not do nearly as well in our shootout as the best Island imports, no surprise there as the early UK records were mastered by one of our favorite engineers.

Avoid the Carthage pressings mastered by Sterling. They came in last in our shootout.

The domestic breakdown follows:

Black Island Domestic #1

  • Tubey but hot and spitty.

Black Island Domestic #2

  • Flat, dry and hot (glary or bright)

Carthage Domestic recut from 1983, Sterling on both sides

  • So sandy and lean! They really wanted to add some top end (!)

Defending the Indefensible

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