*Mastering Issues

On Tarkio, Do All the Robert Ludwig Mastered Copies Have Hot Stampers?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2023

This commentary describes some observations we made after doing a shootout for Tarkio a few years back.

It’s one of those very special recordings that deserves credit for helping us dramatically improve the quality of our playback.

I learned a lot about unhyped, unprocessed, Tubey Magical sound from Tarkio and treasure the music it contains to this day.

Even though all the original Pink Label pressings are mastered by the great Robert Ludwig, they have a marked tendency to be dull, thick and opaque.

On too many of the original pressings we’ve played, even after a good cleaning the top end and upper midrange are a bit rolled off, causing the sound to be smoother than it should be. And of course the way we discover that fact is simplicity itself: the best pressings do not suffer from rolled-off sound.

Analog that is “super-smooth” is the kind of sound that is simply the reverse of the brighter, edgier quality that many CDs suffer from. But both of them are wrong. As Goldilocks will tell you, ideally there will always be a pressing with the correct tonality, neither smooth nor bright, and the way we know that is by playing a bunch of copies and finding the ones in the pile with that tonally correct sound.

We can’t predict which ones will have it, but we sure can hear which ones do.

But finding it without a pile of copies is very hard, almost impossible. How “tonally correct” is any given copy compared to “perfectly tonally correct?” You need plenty of copies to know that, as well as a tonally neutral system capable of playing them properly.

If you like your audiophile pressings to sound super smooth, smooth as mud, there is a guy that offers exactly what you are looking for. His name is Pete Hutchison. He has built a lucrative business for himself making all his records sound like they are being played back through 50s tube electronics.

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Out of Polarity Stampers for Bang-Baaroom Revealed

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dick Schory

Presenting another one of the many pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some copies.

An amazing discovery from Better Records. Many copies of this album are have their polarity reversed on side two (the side with Buck Dance, one of the better tracks on that side and a great track for testing).

We had two 4s copies of the album and both of them had side two out of polarity.  

UPDATE

7s on side two is out of polarity too.

Just played one today. There’s practically no real top end extension until you reverse the polarity.

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“…this BR copy just lifted the veil.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had a few things to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Meddle he purchased recently, which turned out to have the same stampers as the copy he already owned.

He had no way of knowing what the stampers of our copy were when he ordered it of course. It no doubt came as a surprise, but thankfully Michel did not judge the record we sent him by the stamper numbers. No, he judged it the way it should have been judged, by the sound.

In this case the sound was clearly superior to the copy he had even though the stampers of the two records were identical. (If you would like to see more examples of this phenomenon, we have plenty here. It actually happens all the time. It’s so common that we rarely bother to make blog posts about it. Years ago we wrote a piece about it expressing our views on the subject.)

Hi Tom,

Just a quick note about Meddle WHS. I also had an A!/B! XXX which does sound pretty good and is quiet, but this BR copy just lifted the veil.

Once I dialed in the sweet spot it was a delightful experience. This copy is the bomb!!

Many Thanks,
Michel

Michel,

Not all A!/B!’s are created equal!

Most copies of the album with the right stampers will earn a grade of Super Hot, A++.

Some will be White Hot, A+++.

Almost all the pressings we play will have the same stamper numbers, although you may have read that we did just find another stamper for side two that can win shootouts.

Some of the difference in sound is the result of our using The Prelude Record Cleaning System, in conjunction with the Odyssey record cleaning machine we purchased in 2007 (more on that here).

Clean records sound better than they uncleaned records, and properly cleaned records often sound much better than they otherwise would, oftentimes a full grade better.

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Before and After Science – Rules Are Made to Be Broken

Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Recordings Available Now

The domestic pressings of Before And After Science are typically grainy, low-rez and hard sounding. But that doesn’t mean our best Hot Stamper pressings are imports.

No. The best pressings are made right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Say what? Yes, it’s true. We were SHOCKED to find such Hot Stamper sound lurking in the grooves of a domestic Eno LP. It’s the only one of its kind. In thirty plus years of record playing I can’t think of any domestic Eno LP that ever sounded this good.

Now hold on just a minute. The British pressings of Eno’s albums are always the best, aren’t they?

For the first three albums, absolutely. But rules were made to be broken. This pressing has the knockout sound we associate with the best British originals of Eno’s albums, not the flat, cardboardy qualities of the typical domestic reissue.

The UK pressings we have played have always been awful. We put one in a shootout in 2025 and it was as awful as we remember it. Our notes read:

  • Very lean and dry.
  • Zero bass!
  • Lousy!

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And Here I Thought The Mastering Lab Made Nothing But Good Sounding Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:

Analog at its Tubey Magical finest. You’ll never play a CD (or other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long you live.  This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.

But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.

One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.

The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.

Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*

Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)

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What Good Is Knowing that 2-1B/2-1G Wins Shootouts?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Especially considering the fact that the best copy (3/3) with those stampers earned significantly better grades than the worst copy with those stampers (1.5/1.5)*.

Does anyone have a practical way to get around the confusing and exasperating reality that one set of stampers can sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers can sound not much better than passable? Take a spin and see where the wheel of fortune stops.

To be honest, we can’t say there is a practical way to get around these mysteries, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining the impractical one we came up with twenty years ago and, according to our customers, it works like gangbusters.

Turns out that all you have to do  is just play lots and lots of different copies of albums and they will tell you how they sound.

In the case of the record you see below, the copies with the best stampers and the copies with some of the worst stampers had the same stampers.

Here is the full stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did this particular shootout for.

We are not revealing what mystery title had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somewhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.

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Everybody Knows that 1s Should Beat 2s Should Beat 3s, Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

In the case of this mystery Living Stereo title, the conventional wisdom holding that the original first pressings (1s) will most likely have sound superior to the higher-numbered pressings (2s) turns out to be right.

Below you will see the complete stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently. Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

Sometimes we do though. To see the titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list we’ve compiled to date is short but more are coming.

The sound of 3s with the Red Label was lean and dry on both the copies we played. This was surprising as the stampers are quite low: 3s/3s.

Many RCA chamber recordings can be dry, and if one owned a nice early stamper pressing of the album with lean, dry sound, one might conclude that this RCA is just another chamber recording with those shortcomings.

But one would be wrong, because the 1s stamper Shootout Winner sounded amazing, not dry or lean in the least.

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Soultrane – Supposedly Reprocessed into Stereo, But Was It Really?

More of the Music of John Coltrane

It may say stereo on the cover, but this album is pure, glorious MONO, with sound that is full-bodied, relaxed, Tubey Magical and tonally correct.

This is a mono recording that has supposedly been reprocessed into stereo. Rudy Van Gelder did the mastering, and my guess is he decided to leave the sound mono and simply not tell anyone. Who can blame him? He engineered it in mono, so why fix what ain’t broke just because the label decided to print the cover and the label with the word “stereo” in order to generate more sales?

We’re lucky he did. The early OJC reissues of this title are awful, and whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad.

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Allow Us to Make the Case that Even CDs Have Better Sound than Classic’s Vinyl

brahmvioli_1903_debunk

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 1903 is a disaster: shrill, smeary and profoundly unmusical.

In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records Living Stereo pressing.

The best Heifetz records on Classic were, if memory serves, LSC 2734 (Glazunov), LSC 2603 (Bruch) and LSC 2769 (Rozsa).

They aren’t nearly as offensive as the others, and one is actually quite good. If you can pick one up for ten or twenty bucks, you might get your money’s worth depending, I suppose, on how critically you listen to your classical records.

The CDs are better for all I know. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s generally poor track record.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for the Scythian Suite Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

When it comes to the Scythian Suite, we’ve decided that there is no good reason to put the Ansermet recordings in our shootouts anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. They are perfectly good records, but the Abbado is a step up both in performance and sound. Our main listening guy summed up the differences of the two recordings this way.

  • I prefer the DG version (2530 967) for sound and performance.
  • The London is very rich and lively but the big drums on the DG are killer, hard to beat!

So, out of the goodness of our hearts, we can now reveal the Shootout Winning stampers: 1W/1W.

However, in the case of CS-6538, knowing the right stampers is not going to get you very far.

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least six copies the way we did.

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