Shootout Winning Stampers Revealed

Shootout Winning Stampers for La Boutique Fantasque Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rossini Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our current favorite recording of La Boutique Fantasque is the one Solti recorded for Decca in 1957.

It belongs to that very special group of roughly 150 orchestral recordings which have the potential to offer the discriminating (and well-heeled) audiophile the best performances of major works with by far the highest quality sound.

It has been our experience that modern remastered pressings simply cannot compete with the best pressings of these landmark recordings.

The Fiedler (LSC 2084) is still a very good record, but we no longer see much reason to carry it when the Solti is better in almost every way (and quieter as a rule to boot).

Below we have reproduced our full stamper sheet, including the Shootout Winning stampers, which happen to be 3S/4S for this album.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Rhythms of the South Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Exotica and Bachelor Pad Recordings Available Now

There are some records that, no matter how amazing the sound, and how good the music is, simply will not find favor with our customers. This is one of them. I happen to like the music, and the sound is shockingly good, a true Demo Disc for those of you with big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a spacious, heavily treated room like the one you see below.

We are most likely not going to be doing shootouts for this title in the future, so we thought we would share with everyone what we know about the record, which boils down to which stampers have the potential to do well and which do not.

As you can see, Stan Goodall did a much better job mastering the early Blueback London pressings for Decca than Jack Law.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?

The originals all have the same Blueback cover.

In this case, the stamper numbers are the only way to separate the potential winners from the sure losers.

11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 3 3 1E 1E other copies: 2.5/2, 2/2.5
11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 1.5 1 2D 2D s1 dry, flat, trashy. s2 smeary, messy, boring
RE ABOVE: I FOUND THIS IN A BOX. THOUGHT IT SOUNDED REALLY GREAT, ESP. T1, S1

Jack Law’s cutting for side one was

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It’s Already So Good, How Could It Get Any Better?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not 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 big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.

But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings of CS 6101, Music of Berlioz, are the way to go.

It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.

It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.

Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound  tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.

No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.

No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.

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RE-2 Wins Our Shootouts for this Jimmy Smith Recording

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

What happens when all the stampers are RE-2?

This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the Jimmy Smith Verve album you see pictured to the left and whose stamper sheet is shown below.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings? The stamper numbers are no help.  There were some markings in the dead wax for the 3+ copies that were different from the copies that earned lower grades, but they are hard to read and most sellers we buy from would struggle to identify them.

No, on this record there was really nothing to go by other than the sound.

From our shootout panel’s point of view, this is the only way it can possibly work.

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Here Are the Shootout Winning Stampers for SR 90435

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

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 five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Schubert’s Ninth Revealed!

More of the Music of Franz Schubert

Looking to pick up a Hot Stamper on your own?

Easy — all the best Decca copies in our shootout were mastered by Ted Burkett and were incribed with the stampers 5G/7G.

I suppose it’s only fair to point out that all the worst copies had those same stampers.

There were a few others as well — it was quite a big shootout — but most of those ended up in the middle of the pack.

And here you thought I was actually being helpful.

But we are being helpful. We’re sharing with you an important truth.

Stamper numbers only tell part of the story, and they can be very misleading, in the same sense that a little knowledge is sometimes a dangerous thing.

To know what a record sounds like you have to play it.

This is a subject near and dear to us here at Better Records, and that has been the case for many decades.

We discuss it at length in a commentary you may have seen on the site called the book of Hot Stampers.

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Our Shootout Winning Stampers for Gaite Parisienne

More of the Music of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

UPDATE 2026

Our favorite performance of Gaite Parisienne is the one from Readers Digest. (Don’t bother to look for it on our site. We never have any stock as it is too hard to find and usually too noisy for most audiophiles.)

In 2004 we wrote:

11S/10S are the best stampers we have found for this amazing DEMONSTRATION QUALITY record!

I think that information still holds up.

I can also tell you that 5S/5S has never impressed us much. We’re not sure if it’s bad enough to belong in the bad shaded dog category, but audiophiles would be wise to give it a miss at anything over a nominal price.

Side 1 plays nearly NM without a pop! Side 2 opens with a half inch scratch. But think about it — isn’t one side about the right amount for this kind of music? Do you really need to play side 2 after hearing side 1? This copy gives you a good portion of the music with AMAZINGLY GOOD SOUND.

This 1954 2-track recording is RCA’s first stereo recording of the work.

1954. Can you believe it? Four mics and two channels and it blows away 90% of all the classical recordings ever made.

Some old record collectors and tube equipment lovers [not so much anymore] say classical recording quality ain’t what it used to be. This record proves it.

(And this record proves that sometimes old records just sound like old records.)