Mastering Commentaries

“…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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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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A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Record Reviewing

Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z

Allow me to respond to a comment left by a fellow named Ian Malone.

It was left in the comments section for the interview Steve Westman did with me.

He wrote:

Quite happy for you to promote your business Tom, but surely you are a better person than doing it in this way. I know that other people in the industry have said unkind things about you but you can rise above these insults.

My response:

I never say that the people making these modern records, as well as those reviewing them, are malicious or evil. I say they make or review bad sounding records and are simply misguided and, more than anything else, incompetent.

Am I being unkind? If Michael Bay makes one bad movie after another, are we unkind to point that out? I don’t know whether or not he is a bad person, but I do know that he is a bad filmmaker, and gets called out regularly for putting out a bad product.

Everyone understands that this is a matter of taste. If you always wished The Beatles albums had more bass, more compression and a smoother tonal balance overall, you can buy the new Heavy Vinyl pressings and get the sound you prefer on every title The Beatles ever released.

However, I hope you know that the sound I have just described does not exist on the master tapes.

UPDATE 2026

I would amend the above statement to say “that the sound I have just described is very unlikely to exist on the master tapes,” since all of the pressings of The Beatles’ music that we think sound more correct do not have that sound. Where that “more correct” sound came from is a matter of speculation, but we sure know it when we hear it, as do our customers. More on that subject here.

I have no way of actually knowing that for a fact, but since no mastering engineer before 2014 had ever put that sound on an actual record, I think we can safely say that the evidence supports the idea that a completely “new sound” was specifically created for The Beatles when their catalog was remastered early in this century. [1]

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Old Tapes, New Tapes, You Know We’ve Heard Our Share

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

I ran into a comment I had made more than twenty years ago about a Hot Stamper jazz reissue from the 70s that, at the time, we thought sounded better than any other version. The original pressing of the record would have come out in the fifties. We wrote:

“The master tapes were about fifteen years old when this record was mastered.  Compare that to a current cutting which would be made from approximately fifty year old tapes.”

Perhaps that explains it.

Or maybe it doesn’t. Whether it explains it or not, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but guesswork.

It has no predictive value.

If, like most people, you enjoy having your biases confirmed, then by all means, whatever reasons work for you are fine by us.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for The Planets Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Holst Available Now

You may have noticed that on the few occasions when we actually do give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we are loathe to identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a substantial share of the costs we bear, costs that sometimes accrue over the course of many years, decades even. Eventually these costs are passed on to our customers, accounting for some of the admittedly high prices you see on our site.

But this title is going to be an exception, with many more to follow. We are officially giving out stamper information for this London, information that took us more than a decade to acquire. Maybe even two decades.

The right 2W/4W pressings of CS 6734, the Decca recording of Holst’s The Planets conducted by Zubin Mehta, are the best we have ever played. Based on our experience over the years, these are the only stampers that have any chance of winning a shootout.

Below you will find the grades for all the top copies from our most recent efforts, as well as the also-rans with those same stampers that we played.

Only two pressings earned a top grade, and each of them managed to do so on only one side. This is by far the most common result of a shootout. 3+/3+ copies are the exception, not the rule.

Whatever caused the amazing sides of the best pressings to come out differently from the not-nearly-as-good sides of the other pressings must have happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that was of course not under the control of the mastering engineer who cut the record in the UK for Decca, Harry Fisher.

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Anatomy of a Failed Shootout

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

By the early 2000s we had finally come to the conclusion that the RCA pressings of the Beethoven 7th offered the best combination of sound and performance we could find.

By 2024 we had enough copies — seven in total — to do a shootout. The best copy we were able to salvage from this debacle is described, perhaps too generously, below.

This Decca-recorded, Shaded Dog pressing of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 debuts on the site with big, spacious, and lively Double Plus (A++) Living Stereo sound or close to it.

Side one is doing just about everything right – it’s rich, clear, undistorted, open, and has depth and transparency to rival the best recordings you may have heard, and side two is not far behind in all those areas.

The full stamper sheet shown below makes clear what happens when your luck just plain runs out. The Soria pressings were by far the best — they were the only ones to earn 3+ on either side — but side two of all three copies we played was defective, rendering them all but worthless.

When RCA recut the record for their regularly priced Living Stereo release, LSC-2536, the dropoff in sound quality was profound, a fact readily seen from our notes. (“Rich but bright, side two is worse.”)

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Jimmy Page’s Houses of the Holy Needed Tubes and Didn’t Get Them

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We did not care for the newly remastered version of Houses of the Holy. It badly lacks the kind of mastering that Robert Ludwig brought to the sound, and by that we mean lots of lovely tubes in the mastering chain.

What tube equipment he used and how he used it is something we have been researching for years now, but rather than go down that rabbit hole, let’s just say the Tubey Magic that is all over the original cuttings of the album is hard to find on the new one, and that means it’s missing a quality that makes Houses of the Holy one of the most luscious audiophile listening experiences one can have, even for those of us who long ago gave up on tube equipment for the home.

The notes for side one, track one (The Song Remains the Same) and track three (Over the Hills and Far Away), read:

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The Most Serious Fault of the Typical Half-Speed Mastered LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary must be fairly old because we haven’t bothered to play anything put out by Sundazed in longer than I can remember.

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.

It’s dead-as-a-doornail sound, plain and simple.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? (Apparently the guy who wrote this absurd list of records you should buy It has a number of inexcusably at best mediocre and mostly awful sounding Sundazed records.)

But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.

So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.

But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.

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