Label Advice

Some of the titles listed here have better sound on labels that many record collectors would probably not assume would be the best.

Other titles have inferior sound based on the labels we’ve identified in these listings.

Keep in mind that all the practical advice you see here is based solely on the numerous experiments we’ve run and the data we’ve collected from them.

The Polydor Super Deluxe UK Pressings Are the Only Way to Fly

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Roxy Music Available Now

No domestic pressing or other import in our experience has ever been better than passable; we know, we’ve been cleaning and playing them for more than thirty years.

This British LP is cut by one of my favorite mastering houses in England, which no doubt accounts for the excellent sound. The estimable Robert Ludwig cut the domestic pressings. Unfortunately for us Americans it sounds to us like they gave him a dub tape to master from. (The same thing happened on Avalon by the way.)

This is a transitional album. Some of it sounds like Avalon (Oh Yeah, Over You, etc.) and some of it sounds more like their earlier material. It may not be as consistent as Avalon but it’s well worth owning for its best songs (listed below) and comes highly recommended for fans of the band. 

Best Tracks

Standout tracks on side one include In the Midnight Hour / Oh Yeah / My Only Love

Standout tracks on side two include Over You / Eight Miles High / Rain, Rain, Rain

Insightful reviews for the album follow:

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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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We Was Wrong about Our Best Black Label Copy Back in the Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Turns out the Black Label early pressings actually are the best sounding. In 2025 we discovered we were wrong when we said we were wrong back in 2015.

And as far as we can tell, unlike anyone reviewing records for audiophiles writing (or speaking) these days, we have no problem admitting to it. Admitting to our mistakes is significant for many reasons, but the two that immediately come to mind are these:

  • It is a hallmark of progress in audio. Assuming your new findings are true, you are better at your job than you used to be.
  • More importantly, it is the secret of our success. How can you learn anything when you already know it all?

We write about how regular shootouts are and always will be the best way to improve the sound quality of your collection.

What we don’t say much about is how any music-loving audiophile could ever find the time to do this work. Where would the time come from to do multiple shootouts over many years, or the time to find the records, or the money it takes to buy them these days, when ever record ever pressed seems to command a collector price.

God knows we’re no angels in this regard. We do it for the simple reason that it’s our job to do shootouts year in and year out for the same records again and again. There will never be a time when everyone who wants a better sounding Abbey Road already has a good-enough sounding Abbey Road. The best copies are never short of buyers. The prices may change but the demand only goes in one direction: up.

We are not in the position of having a choice and choosing to do the right thing.

Applying the lesson of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, we are set up to do what needs to be done in order to run a business devoted to pleasing our customers. Millions of other business owners could say exactly the same. If for some reason their businesses aren’t set up properly, or run properly, or don’t offer goods at a price their customers are willing to pay, as day folllows night they will surely not be in business for long.

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Yes, The Best Plum and Orange Pressing Will Win Every Shootout

Hot Stamper Pressings of Prog Rock Albums Available Now

Our rare, original Plum and Orange UK original here put every other pressing to shame. This is some of the best High Production Value rock music of the ’70s, thanks to the band and a Mr Eddie Offord.

If you’ve ever heard one of our Yes Album Hot Stampers, you’ll know what to expect here – HUGE and POWERFUL sound.

Although the UK first label originals will always win our shootouts, the early UK reissues on the Red and Green label can still sound quite good on the right pressing.

Skip all domestic copies of this album, as well as the domestic pressings on the second label of their first album. They are clearly made from dubbed tapes.

Amazing Acoustic Guitars

Acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. The harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum.

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Candy-O on the SP Label Is Hot, Flat and Not Worthy of a Shootout

Hot Stamper Pressings of the New Wave Recordings Available Now

These days it’s almost silly to give out title-specific advice on the Cars second album, Candy-O. We never have any Hot Stamper pressings of the record in stock!

You can’t find vintage copies in the bins anymore, and sellers on the internet send us too many misgraded noisy copies for us to want to spend the time returning them.

But here is a bit of advice that you won’t find anywhere else, and by anywhere else, I mean anywhere else in the entire world because nobody knows this album the way we do.

This is not a boast; this is, as far as we can tell, a fact. We’ve played scores of copies in shootouts for more than twenty years. Who else can say the same? To pretend that any such person or group of persons exists is believe in something for which there is no evidence.

Let’s be honest: Audiophiles and those who write for them have never done the work it would take to figure most of this stuff out. That’s why they don’t write about it and that’s why we get comments like “SP on the label means bad sound? Why would that be?”

I bought the album in 1979 as soon as it was released and fell in love with it the way I had the first album. (The first album is still their Masterpiece but Candy-O ranks a close second.) In 2007 we played a copy that sounded so good we could hardly believe it. Regardless of the struggles involved, we hope to be able to bring more copies to the site soon.

As far as the SP label goes, in this case we noticed a pattern that we typically would let the shootout make clear to us after the fact — that the SP pressings were the weakest of all the originals with RTB markings.

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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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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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Three Labels, But Only One Wins Shootouts

More Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better on the Right Reissue

There are three Epic labels for this record.

The originals are yellow, the first reissue is orange, and the last reissue is bluish-black.

I can tell you that only one of those labels produced the best sounding copies in our shootout.

Beyond that you will have to buy a sample of each and do your own shootout. Finding clean copies was quite difficult; it took us a long time to get enough to play, and, as we said, most pressings are dreadful.

Those of you who like to read our commentaries and play along at home are going to have a rough time with this title. We sure did.

But the results are worth it, because we LOVE this music! Music just doesn’t get any better. If this album doesn’t lift your spirits, I can’t imagine what would. And note that many of the best songs here are exclusive to this greatest hits and cannot be found on any other album. That makes it a Must Own in our book.

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On Heroes, It Took Us Ages to Break the Sound Barrier

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Because the conventional wisdom turned out to be so wrong.

Our intuition that the British originals of Heroes would sound the best was incorrect.

The experiments we carried out falsified that prediction.

In our world, intuitions have a bad track record, but more than a few audiophiles — many of whom are addicted to sharing their “record knowledge” on audiophile forums and youtube channels — seem unaware of the shortcomings of this approach.

Taking a page from one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, we’ve opted to use a more scientific approach in order to discover the record pressings that have by far the best soundi, and we encourage you to do likewise. 

We pioneered the evidence-based approach to finding the best sounding pressings, and, like all good scientists, we shared it with everyone. Some in the audiophile community have taken it to heart, but most have chosen to put their faith in reviewers, forum posters, common sense and logic.

None of these produce consistently good results, but those who use these methods are loathe to question them and only rarely if ever learn the error of their ways.

Once a decision has been made and a specific pressing acquired — you could call it door number three I suppose — cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias immediately kick in to justify the result, and soon enough the game is over. The prize has been won. It’s as good as it gets. Whatever faults it may have must lie in the recording, not the pressing.

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On This Rachmaninoff Title, the Right Reissues Clearly Have the Best Sound

More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.

Well, now we know.

The earliest Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we offer.

We never offered the record in Hot Stamper form because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.

Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.

Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.

Did Harry have a good later pressing?

Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did?

Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.

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