Music Genres – Commentaries

So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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Look Around on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary, about how wrong I was about the Look Around album on Speakers Corner, was written shortly after that pressing came out in the early 2000s.

My foolishness is a textbook case of live and learn. One thing I can tell you for certain is that, although I didn’t know it, I sure had a lot to learn back in those days.

2007 was the year that the penny finally dropped and we finally gained a better understanding of what was going on with the sound of the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue.

Practically everything we would do in audio from that point onward would take us down a very different path than the one we had unknowingly been on. We saw the light, and there was simply never going to be a way to unsee it.

Our Old Review

We were fairly impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001.

Since then we have learned a thing or two. Their version is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination can it compete with any Hot Stamper pressing found on our site.

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“We could appreciate every tiny decision Heiftez was making. When the orchestra came in, it was thunder.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

A good customer wrote us the following letter. It’s mostly about the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and The Wall.  (Emphasis added.)

Dear Tom,

The next best thing to a big pile of Better Records is a friend with a big pile of Better Records.

Last night my good buddy Bill came over with a selection from his recent spate of hot stamper purchases.

You remember Bill, right? He’s the friend who knew I was into stereos, so he came over for some advice about how to assemble a top of the line modern digital playback system.

I played him my White Hot Stamper of Rumours, he buried his face in his hands, and took a deep plunge into building himself a Port-recommended vinyl playback rig, and he’s now a Better Records aficionado.

First up, we played his White Hot Stamper of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. It was magnificent. We could appreciate every tiny decision Heiftez was making. When the orchestra came in, it was thunder.

Then, we played my Super Hot Stamper. Same stamper, and mine had quieter vinyl, but man, the sound just wasn’t the same. Mine was more shrill (but slightly), and the orchestra was less meaty (but slightly.) I’ve always loved my copy, still do, but the White Hot Stamper clearly improved on it. We were simply hearing more music.

I know a lot of people say they have great sounding records. For anybody who thinks they may have stumbled across a hot stamper out in the wild, I have one simple test: turn it up. If it’s a true White Hot Stamper, you just want to keep turning up the volume. If you get to the point where you say, “actually, that’s a little too loud. Let me just dial it back a little. Ah, that’s better.” Well then, you don’t have a hot stamper on your hands. White Hot Stampers just invite you to play them loud. There’s no limit, they just cohere without getting shrill or strident. It’s a truly strange effect, and until you hear it for yourself, you won’t believe me.

Next up, we put on Bill’s White Hot Stamper of The Wall. Very loud, of course.

It was probably the best my stereo has ever sounded.

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Dark Side of the Moon – “A Wasted Purchase”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a White Hot Stamper pressing of Dark Side of the Moon he purchased recently. Bill writes:

No, not my White Hot Stamper purchase.

But, rather, my purchase of an original UK edition, the so-called Holy Grail of pressings.

When I purchased the White Hot Stamper of Dark Side of the Moon a couple of weeks ago (for what seemed like an outrageous amount of money), I thought I’d compare it to the version I had, the 50th Anniversary, and send it back for a refund if it didn’t blow me away. It was the same strategy I had used several years ago when I bought a White Hot Stamper of Led Zeppelin II.

And the same thing happened to me this time that happened last time—the White Hot Stamper blew me away! It was so transparent. I heard things in the mix I had never heard before. The bass was tight, and the soundstage and “air” were HUGE. It was as big of a night/day comparison as the Led Zeppelin II comparison was.

Now, the bad news, for me.

Every source I checked said the original UK pressing is far and away the best pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

So I bit the bullet and bought a pressing on eBay. It was, as advertised, in mint condition, with almost no surface noise.

And it was AWFUL compared to the White Hot Stamper. The soundstage was tiny in comparison, the bass was bloated, and overall it sounded muffled and lifeless. And, unfortunately, that UK pressing didn’t come with a money back guarantee. So I have a nice collectible on my hands that I will never listen to.

As Tom has pointed out many times, there are variations within pressings, so it might be that I just got a dud of a first pressing. One thing I have learned, though, is that even your outrageously priced White Hot Stampers, and maybe even especially your outrageously priced White Hot Stampers, are, in fact, a good bargain. Audio nirvana.

Bill

Bill,

Thanks for your letter, and sorry to hear you threw all that money away on a white elephant you will never find any use for. Unlike our records, at least it has some collector value. Discogs and ebay are your two best options for helping it find a new home.

The one good use I can think of for it would be to use it as a comparison pressing next time somebody comes over to your house and wants to hear the album. You could do a little shootout for them, just to see how far their jaw drops when the needle hits the groove on your Hot Stamper pressing.

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Finding the Rare Pressing of Heavy Weather with An Extended Top End

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

It has been our experience that the copies with high frequency extension and the clarity, space and percussive energy that results from it are almost always the best sounding.

You may have read elsewhere on the site that what separates many of the best Columbia LPs from their competition is an open, extended top end.

For some reason, Columbia, more than most labels, had a habit of making slightly dull records. Dull does not work for this album. 

When the highs on the record are right, it all comes together. Unfortunately, most copies don’t have those highs. There’s more to it than that of course: some copies lack bass, some are a bit grainy and gritty sounding — the normal problems associated with vinyl records are all here to one degree or another.

But when you have good highs you are about 80 to 85% of the way toward a Hot Stamper. Complete the picture with bass, dynamics, etc. (and a big speaker system) and there’s a good chance the sound will blow your mind.

Heavy Weather is a classic case of yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

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Roger The Engineer Is Awful on the Early UK Pressing

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

A hall of shame pressing if there ever was one.

The UK pressing of Roger the Engineer we played was pure crap.

Cool for collectors I suppose, but very bad news for audiophiles.

Your response to this news may depend on which camp you find yourself in. If you love collecting original pressings, we would put you in the record collector camp, not the audiophile one. Audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality, so if the more original pressing is the one you want, then you are a record collector first and an audiophile second, if at all. Harsh? Let’s call a spade a spade.

Regardless, we ask that you please not buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are always going to be the best sounding pressings. The hundreds of reissues listed here prove otherwise.

The original British pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a poor imitation of what was most likely on the master tape, as revealed by the Edsel reissues.

Maybe you have a good sounding one. We can’t say you don’t.  But we would be very unlikely to spend much money on an original import pressing after hearing this one.

And the domestic records we’ve played were clearly made from dub tapes, so they’re a bust too.

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Letter of the Week – “I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the Hot Stamper Aqualung I just bought.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

This testimonial letter comes from our good customer Roger, who was blown away by the Hot Stamper pressing of Aqualung we sent him [many, many years ago].

Roger, as expected, did a thorough shootout of his own, comparing of our Hot Stamper against the audiophile usual suspects. The result? Another knockout for our Hot Stamper pressing.

Note that a well known audiophile reviewer did his own shootout for the album years ago, failing miserably, unlike our good customer Roger, who succeeded admirably.

Hi Tom,

I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the hot stamper Jethro Tull Aqualung I just bought. Darn you again and your hot stampers.

To give you some idea of how many times I have heard this album, backtrack to 1971 when it came out. On a Boy Scout trip a friend of mine had a portable 8-track tape player and this one tape, Aqualung. I remember sleeping on one of the seats in a car with the Aqualung tape on infinite repeat all night. In high school I had the 8-track and listened to this record hundreds of times.

Through the years after becoming an audiophile I bought many different copies looking for the ultimate-sounding LP, finally settling on the MFSL version, which I bought when it came out.

So I had a good time comparing 4 copies:

    1. the MFSL half-speed,
    2. the DCC version,
    3. the 25th anniversary digitally remastered copy,
    4. and the Hot Stamper.

First I tried the 25th anniversary and it was just as I remembered it — it sounds digital, like a CD. Lots of detail, but hard, hyped, edgy, flat soundstage, compressed dynamics. As digital usually sounds, guitars were harsh and jumped unnaturally out of the mix.

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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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It Doesn’t Get Much More Real on Vinyl Than This

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

Pentangle’s first album is an honest-to-goodness Demo Disc.

When for a (thankfully) brief time back in the 70s I was selling audio equipment, the song “Pentangling” was a favorite demo cut to play in the store. The sound of the string bass and snare drum are amazingly natural; I don’t know of any other pop album from the era that presents the vibrant timbre of those two instruments better.

The Transatlantic British originals can be quite good as well, but are very tough to come by in good condition these days, and pricey when you find them.

This record easily qualifies for our Top 100 List, it’s that good (but unfortunately too rare to make the cut).

The Best Sides

The true foundation of the music is provided by two legendary guitar heavyweights, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. With Jacqui McShee’s almost unbearably sweet vocals soaring above them, this album presents the classic lineup at its best, with superior sonics to boot.

It’s Acoustic!

The unprocessed folky sound found throughout the album has its audiophile credentials fully in order, especially in the area of guitar harmonics, as well as drums that sound like real drums actually sound. (How many of the ’70s rock albums in our Top 100 have that natural drum sound? Not many when you stop to think about it.)

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Letter of the Week – “…the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Dark Side of the Moon he purchased a while back:

Dear Tom and Fred,

This is one of those records where I already had a handful of well-regarded pressings. How intriguing that it was such an obscure pressing that won your shootout! [1]

I compared the WHS to my early US pressing (Ken Perry mastered [2]), my MoFi [3], a Japanese “blue triangle” pressing, and of course, the 2016 remaster [4].

Sure, there are tons of sought-after pressings that go for prices even more exorbitant than what I paid you, none of which I’ve heard, so I guess it’s not a proper shootout. But, at least among the ones I have, the WHS bested them all handily. In each of the others I was able to find something that I could appreciate, that on its own compared well to the WHS. This is such a great, and well-recorded, album that any pressing of it is going to have something worthwhile to offer.

The Japanese pressing came closest to the WHS. [Doubtful we would agree with you on the merits of this Japanese pressing. We rarely like them, and we like them less with each passing year.]

At the other end of the spectrum the 2016 remaster, noted for its great bass, just sounded clogged and thudding [5].

Compared to each of them, the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others. Is it 15x better than my next-best copy? Objectively, probably not. But, subjectively, it must be, since I’m keeping it.

Since the hot stamper arrived the day after my Legacy Signature III’s got here, it was one of the first records I played on them. What a great pairing they are! 

This was of course the first mini-shootout I’ve done using the Legacys. What a great window into a record these speakers provide. I switched back to my Bowers and Wilkins 805s and re-ran the shootout, just to see if my impressions would still align. They did, with the hot stamper providing more vividness and a bigger sound than the other pressings did, even on the B&Ws.

But on the bigger speakers the hot stamper stands apart from the others by a wider margin.

Thank you both for all the great records you find, and thank you Tom for the stereo advice. You keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

Aaron

Aaron,

Glad to hear you are a Legacy man now. We love our Legacy Speakers and can’t imagine doing shootouts without them. (The old ones, not the newer models.) The Big Speaker sound, at loud levels, is what allows a record like Dark Side of the Moon to be every bit the immersive experience we know it can be if you have a top quality pressing to play. Now you know it too.

And thanks for doing the shootout so that you know exactly what our best copies of Dark Side are capable of. If you make any improvement to your system, be sure to go back to this Dark Side and hear the change for yourself.

Then play any of these other pressings and note how the gap has widened. That is our experience and we expect you will find the same differences in your listening room as well.

The following notes may be of general interest:

[1} Obscure pressings that sound better than everything else are our bread and butter here at Better Records.

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