*Pressing Advice

The advice here should help you in your search for better sounding pressings.

At the very least it may help you avoid some of the worst ones.

“I felt wonderfully uplifted and clear-headed, and all the noise in my head had vanished. It lasted for hours. All that remained was a smile.”

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One of our good customers recently wrote us an especially touching letter about two debut albums we share a love for: Led Zeppelin’s and Jeff Beck’s. After listening to them at length, he felt the need to put into words the deep and powerful feelings our records had given him. (Emphasis added.)

Dear Tom, Kenji, and the Better Records Team,

I am writing to share my absolute astonishment after listening to the Hot Stampers I recently acquired. To give you some context, I set up a rigorous shootout against my own collection.

For Led Zeppelin, I prepared seven of my finest vintage vinyl copies:

    • One UK “Turquoise” First Pressing
    • Six US copies (cut by RG or GP; pressed by Presswell or Monarch with △12703 / △18257 matrix codes, spanning the Broadway to Rockefeller eras)

For Jeff Beck, All from my brain memory not real records:

    • Two “Japanese” First Pressing and reissue
    • Two UK “Blue Columbia” MONO & STEREO Pressing and one EMI reissue

If the seven Zeppelin records that rivaled the HOT STAMPER were like 8mm film, then the HOT STAMPER was 70mm Cinemascope!

A vast, rich space—stretching from wall to wall, floor to ceiling—appeared right before my eyes, and the sound that burst forth passed right through me.

I was so astonished by the sheer difference in scale that I couldn’t believe it.

I kept turning up the volume, bathing in the sound like a shower.

When I played the UK Turquoise and GP/MONARCH records again at the same volume, the sound was so blindingly bright and overwhelmingly loud that I had to lift the needle after just a few seconds.

As for Beck, ever since I was a teenager, no matter how many times I listened to *TRUTH*, I could never be satisfied with its sound, so I ended up selling it. I’d concluded that while *TRUTH* is a matter of personal musical taste, it wasn’t a record that sounded good. However, after seeing *SKEPTICAL AUDIOPHILE* recommend this record, I decided to give it one last challenge.

When I turned up the volume, it was as if the band was right there in front of me, in the fifth row. I was sharing that space with them, and the sound came straight at me without any barriers.

It was as if I were actually there at the concert.

This was my first time having an experience like this with my home audio system.

This is what a “WHITE HOT STAMPER” is! What a blissful time I had! Warm, Rich, Dynamic, & Transparent!

P.S.

1. After finishing both records, I felt wonderfully uplifted and clear-headed, and all the noise in my head had vanished. It lasted for hours. All that remained was a smile; my wife even remarked, “You look so happy.”

I can say with certainty that this was due to the chemical effects of the HOT STAMPER. I believe it resulted from a decrease in stress hormones like cortisol and an increase in the secretion of “happiness hormones” such as dopamine and serotonin.

Furthermore, after I finished listening and was tidying up the room where the records were scattered—something I’ve experienced several times before—my digestive system became more active. I attribute this to the relaxation effect of the HOT STAMPER. It’s likely due to the “brain-gut axis,” where my favorite music and the superb sound quality triggered parasympathetic dominance, stimulating intestinal peristalsis.

2. Considering the time, energy, and money spent tracking down this rare Zeppelin record, this is no ordinary man’s job. There is a Bible verse that says, “Ask, and it will be given to you.”

I offer my deepest respect and admiration, as well as my boundless gratitude and love, to the treasure hunters led by Tom, who have successfully completed this mission—a mission truly bestowed upon them by God.

Sincerely yours,
Nobu

Dear Nobu,

Thanks for describing so elegantly what it feels like to finally hear music you have treasured for decades sounding the way you always dreamed it could. I know well the feelings of bliss, exhilaration and joy that coursed through you. I’ve experienced them countless times myself since I first got into home audio fifty years ago.

There is a joy that cannot be expressed when music sounds so good there are no words to describe it. This is what audiophiles such as you and me live for.

Few have had the pleasure of experiencing it outside of a live musical event. We were able to do it with records, but they were very special records, the kinds of records few audiophiles know exist, or have any reason to believe exist. Fewer still have ever experienced such records. Indeed, we must count ourselves fortunate to have had the privilege.

You describe us as treasure hunters, which is a very good way of looking at who we are and what we do. We have been hunting for treasure for more than 30 years. Our dedication increased dramatically over the last twenty or so. By then we had finally given up on the false promise of the modern remastered record. (Fittingly, it was a exceptional straw that broke the camel’s back.)

You played our Hot Stamper pressings (Super Hot for Zep 1, White Hot for Truth) against all the copies that the conventional wisdom told you were sure to have the best sound. Now you know something not widely understood by the audiophile community, which is simply that when it comes to records, the conventional wisdom is not very good at predicting which pressings will turn out to have better sound.

This blog has well over a thousand commentaries detailing chapter and verse (to make use of a phrase associated with the bible) how this is simply a fact that cannot be denied by anyone who has carefully studied the matter.

You proved it for yourself. You did your own shootout. Who can gainsay the insights you acquired? Certainly not those who have never played one of our records. What evidence do they have to support their views?

Do they have a theory to base their objections on?

Is it more than a conjecture? A feeling? Some intuition? A form of knowledge beyond our understanding?

As you now know better than anyone, whatever they think they have to disprove the possibility of the Hot Stamper pressing, it is surely a crock.

I very much enjoyed hearing about the happiness you felt when playing such exceptional pressings of these wonderful albums. The joy of music is in many ways the greatest joy there is. It is the one thing that has driven me to pursue our hobby more than any other — in fact, to dedicate much of my life to it — and I have never seen reason to regret a moment of it.

Thank you for writing and brightening our day here at Better Records!

Best, TP

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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Are You a Soundphile? I Used to Be One

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

About 30 years ago I got hold of a Japanese pressing of Marriner conducting Haydn’s Toy Symphony and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and was blown away by the absolutely phenomenal quality of the Haydn. Listing the record for sale, I raved:

DEMO QUALITY SOUND! This is the best sounding Toy Symphony you will ever hear!

…all the little toys that play along with the music just JUMP out of the speakers. The recording is so transparent and the toys are so well miked it’s like hearing the work for the first time, or live.

Now we know definitively that this is clearly not true, assuming yoy have one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the EMI original. They are better in every way than the Japanese pressing, which is the one purporting to have audiophile sound.

If this sounds familiar to you, I’m guessing this is not your first visit to the blog or our site. There is almost always a vintage pressing with superior sound when compared to the audiophile pressings made from the same recording.

The problem is: You just don’t know which vintage pressing will have superior sound. Maybe they all will. Maybe none of the copies you own will. There is one, but how do you find it?

In order to get that answer, you have to know how to do carefully controlled shootouts, and not just once, but more often than not a number of them over a period of years. Whatever answer you may come up will most likely be provisional, not definitve, because that’s the only way the process of discovery can work when applying scientific methodologies to the solution of a problem like “which pressings sound best on record X?”.

We did the shootout in 2022 and found out that the best of the original EMI pressings are quite a bit better, a classic case of live and learn, as well as one of the hundreds of breakthrough discoveries we’ve made over the years. That’s what happens when you are in the business of playing records and then selling the best of them to audiophiles looking for superior sound.

I believe I had at least one or two UK EMI pressings to play against the Japanese ones, but all the details of how I came to this conclusion — a proto-shootout, carried out long before I knew how to do a real one — are lost to the mists of time.

Keep in mind that my stereo was dramatically less revealing back then. Also I had not learned how to clean records properly. Those two facts, combined with the underdeveloped listening skills that go with them, helped me to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

No, the Japanese pressing, specifically targeted to audiophiles, or “soundphiles” if you like, is not superior to a properly mastered and pressed UK LP.

If you have more than a handful of Japanese pressings in your collection, you can be sure that there is still plenty of room for improvement in your audio system.

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Isn’t This Supposed to Be a Good Sounding Sonny Rollins Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

It is — or can be — but that’s only possible — as far as we know — on the early stereo pressings. On the mono pressings, the ones originally pressed in 1965 on the black dynagroove label, and never pressed again, not so much. They’re not awful, but they’re not very good either.

Which means that as a general rule, audiophiles should stick to the stereo pressings of this album, in the same way that they should almost always stick to stereo pressings of stereo recordings.

This is a Core Insight we only arrived at after playing hundreds of mono pressings made from tapes originally recorded in stereo. [1] Rarely do the mono pressings of such titles sound remotely as good as the stereo pressings.

Here is how we described a killer stereo copy of The Standard Sonny Rollins we encountered during the course of a shootout in 2025:

The Standard Sonny Rollins is back on the site for only the second time in over four years, here with outstanding sound throughout this original stereo pressing.

Once again the brilliant engineering of Ray Hall for RCA conveys the vitality of live music for these sessions (which were undoubtedly recorded live). Includes superstars like Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, and Bob Cranshaw, who’ve lent their talents to some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

Here is the stamper sheet showing how the mono pressing fared. In the past we’ve had similar luck with the mono pressings of Living Stereo recordings, but this one was cheap and we figured why not?

Collectors often say that the mono pressings of jazz albums are often the best sounding. Well, why not put that proposition to the test? That is after all the business we are in, testing whether something is true or not to the best of our ability.

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For Scottish Fantasy, Forget the Red Seal Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

The 70s Red Seal pressings we’ve played recently have all left a lot to be desired, but, since we had one sitting on a shelf in the backroom with lower stampers, we figured what the hell, let’s clean it up, throw it into our next shootout and hope for the best.

As you can see, the best was not to come.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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Our Four Plus Shootout Winner for Dire Straits from 2011

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review for Dire Straits’ first album was written in 2011. We had just discovered that a pressing of the album was clearly superior to every other pressing we had ever played. We were pretty excited about it and wanted to share the news about our breakthrough.

A substantial amount of the time, breakthroughs come about due to the conventional wisdom being wrong — and us not knowing it until an experiment proved it wrong. The needle is the only thing that can give us an answer we can trust, certainly not the pundits or the self-described experts.

What makes them experts? We have no idea and they never say. They just seem to “know” things, but they never tell us how they know them.

We do. We can’t shut up about all the stuff we know!

No concept is more fundamental to collecting the best sounding pressings than to be able to test records to find out if the received wisdom you are using as a guide is right, wrong or somewhere in-between.

At the bottom of the listing for the album you can see a number of links to other records that share the same qualities as the first Dire Straits release does.

Note that it says “Reissue=Best.” This is because the killer copy we discovered in 2007 was indeed a reissue, and in 2011 we found an even better sounding copy, also a reissue, or perhaps we were somehow able to reproduce it better. Probably a bit of both.

The Hot Stamper pressings of this album we offer to the discerning audiophile are posted in the following categories. If you are looking for other records like the first Dire Straits album, click on any of the links below.

Our 2011 Review

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Luck of the Draw – 2012 Was a Long Time Ago

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bonnie Raitt Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We’re close to having enough copies to do another shootout, our first in four years.

In 2012 we did our first one for Luck of the Draw, at the end of which we found a pressing that was clearly superior to the DCC, our default favorite at the time.

That was 14 years ago, and 14 years is a long time in audio. Having done the shootout many, many times since then, I can tell you two things we have learned:

1) Yes, of course, the domestic copies are better sounding than the DCC.

I often mention that DCC’s releases had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system (more here). That gives an advantage to practically any pressing not mastered by him.

His list of failures is surely one of the longest in the business. Of course, we can only guess about most of them, as we are not in the business of playing junk Heavy Vinyl. We much prefer the business we are in: selling the best sounding vintage pressings of the greatest albums of all time.

2) The domestic pressings are very unlikely to ever win a shootout.

They tend to earn grades of A++ or A+ to A++, and none of them lately has managed to earn a grade of A++ on both sides.

The imports are just too good. They are clearly better sounding, and it does not take a pair of golden ears to hear it. Why that is we have no idea, and we are congenitally opposed to speculating about the subject. (More on that subject below.)

Our 2012 Shootout

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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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Reversed Polarity on Gaite Parisienne

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

LSC 1817 is one of the pressings we discovered with reversed polarity. a very long time ago, 2005, before we got our EAR 324p phono stage that has a convenient switch for reversing polarity.

Superb sound! The top end of this record is PERFECTION. When you hear all the percussion instruments, — the tambourines, triangles, wood blocks and whatnot — they just sound so lovely.

The overall sound is rich and sweet, just like a good vintage RCA should sound. Some may find the sound colored, but I find it enchanting.

Side two, however, sounded fairly unpleasant when I first played it.

As I listened more and more, I came to the realization that the absolute phase was probably inverted. The orchestra, rather than being back behind the speakers where they belong, was coming AT me, a sure sign that something is funny. One way to think about it is the sound stage becomes convex instead of concave.

So I switched my headshell leads and sure enough everything got much better — the orchestra now had depth and the strings became less forward and shrill, and the horns took on more body and had less of that blary quality they sometimes do. (more…)

The Best Reissue Pressings of Way Out West Are Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

When it comes to Contemporary recordings, sometimes the originals are the best sounding pressings. Other times, regardless of how good the originals may be, the best reissues, which is to day the right reissues, somehow manage to beat them.

This is undeniable — at least it is to those of us who audition records without regard to preconceived notions of which pressings are sure to have the best sound, based on attributes such as who mastered them, what label they have, what country they’re from, as well as a host of other things that collectors tend to look for.

We hold a different view. Foundational to understanding the nature of the vinyl LP is the idea that rules were made to be broken — the rules I just mentioned and others just like them.

The winners cannot be predicted. They can only be discovered.

Which is precisely why we do shootouts: to find out which pressings have the best sound, not which ones should have the best sound, or used to have the best sound, or might have the best sound, or were told will have the best sound.

Not only do we not care what anybody else thinks is the best pressing. It’s worse than that. We don’t even care what we used to think was the best pressing.

The current best evidence is the best evidence and that’s all there is to it. When new evidence overturns our previous understanding, then we naturally change our views. It’s the main reason we have no qualms about admitting our mistakes. If you let the evidence guide you in your search for the best sounding pressings, one thing you can be sure of is that you will get a lot of things wrong, and we have.

Not long ago we came across a Shootout Winning pressing of Way Out West with absolutely amazing sound. You can see the notes we took below. We described it this way:

This copy has superb 1957 Contemporary stereo sound – big, open and natural throughout. It’s one of our favorite Rollins records – one listen to this copy and you will know exactly why we love the recordings engineered by Roy DuNann.

Side One

Track One

  • Weighty and rich
  • Very 3-D and warm sax
  • Deep note-like bass

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