*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.

Three Labels, But Only One Ever 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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Advice on Which Sgt. Peppers Pressings to Avoid

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This letter came in many years ago, but the lessons to be learned from Chris’s failed approch to finding a good sounding copy of Sgt. Pepper are no doubt timeless.

Many audiophiles who start collecting records make exactly the same mistakes Chris made, and some percentage of those audiophiles, however small, actually learn from them. Sad to say, it seems that many do not.

In our own humble attempt to rectify the situation, we devote a great deal of time to discussing record collecting on this blog, seeing as how so many audiophiles suffer by going about it in all the wrong ways.

Chris, an erstwhile customer from long ago, sent us a letter describing his search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading his letter is that many record collecting rules were broken in going about the search the way he did.

But then I thought:

What rules?

Whose rules?

Where exactly does one find these rules?

If one wants to avoid breaking them they need to be written down someplace, don’t they? Wikipedia maybe?

Sadly, no, not at Wikipedia, or any place else for that matter — until now. As crazy as it sounds, we are going to try to lay down a few record collecting rules for record loving audiophiles, specifically to aid these individuals in their search for better sounding vinyl pressings. And by “these individuals” we mean you.

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Paul McCartney’s Must Own Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

The best tracks on McCartney’s first album have the quality of LIVE MUSIC in a way that not one out of a hundred rock records do. It sounds like it’s recorded live in the studio, but of course that’s impossible, because Paul plays practically all the instruments himself.

It just goes to show how good a multi-track studio recording can sound when it’s done well.

The recording also has an unprocessed quality which we’ve always found attractive, with some songs sounding more like demos than finished takes, about as far from Abbey Road as it would be possible to get.

In our experience, the real McCartney Magic is only found on the best domestic Apple pressings. We’ve never heard an import that did much for us, and the later CBS issues are hardly worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

This album, like Unplugged and Band on the Run (and not a whole lot else) is SUPERB from start to finish. At the end of side two you want MORE. I wish I could say that about the rest of his discography.

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Some OJC Pressings of Waltz for Debby Can Be Pretty Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby, we took the opportunity to play the early OJC that first came out in the 80s. We found the OJC pressings with the stampers identified below had good, not great sound.

I remember playing the Analogue Productions version from 1992, mastered by Doug Sax, and being shocked at how overly rich, murky, thick and unnatural it sounded. I knew the AP Way Out West was bad. Was every title that Analogue Productions remastered going to sound like it was being played by 50’s JBL speakers powered by Mac 30s?

This was the sound audiophiles had always wanted? This was the sound that made them think they were listening to the master tape? (To prove that bad ideas never die — that sooner or later they return in a different guise — there is a Mr. Hutchison who makes records that sound very similar to those Chad was making in the early 90s. The more things change…)

Back to the OJC of Waltz for Debby. A local fellow who had requested my 1990s catalog, the one in which I say the OJCs just kill the new AP Heavy Vinyl pressings, came over and bought some OJCs, the ones I thought sounded very good, which were the only ones we carried. They were all of  ten bucks each.

He promptly went home, played them and called me to tell me just how awful his AP vinyl of the album sounded and how much better his OJC was in comparison, at less than half the price. I’m sure I said something along the lines of “Tell me something I don’t know!” My credibility established beyond all doubt, he and I soon became fast friends.

I never reviewed the Waltz for Debby on AP, but I wrote reviews for three other AP titles: Way Out West, Chet, and Jazz Giant. Spoiler alert: I thought all three were unbelievably awful.

The G1A/B1 OJC pressing we played suffered these problems:

  • It’s opaque but not too opaque
  • It’s small and a bit dull

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More of the Same Heavy Vinyl Trash from Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix is just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?

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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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Some Blue Notes with New York Labels Just Cannot Be Beat

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Warning: the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this commentary.

Our shootout in 2024 involved all the most important Blue Note labels for this mystery title. New York, Liberty, Black B, White B, all present and accounted for, and all with RVG in the dead wax. (For those who want to know which labels to avoid on Blue Note, you will have to dig through our voluminous reviews and commentaries.)

We don’t need to tell you that those early pressings take us years to find, and cost us a pretty penny — at least the ones that are in audiophile playing condition do — when we can even manage to get hold of them.

And we probably return at least half of what we buy, doubling the trouble of getting a shootout going.

Some folks who produce Heavy Vinyl Blue Note reissues and some of those who review them will tell you that Rudy did not know how to master a record properly. They don’t think his pressings should sound very good to audiophiles, assuming the equipment these audiophiles own is of the highest quality, the way they assume theirs is.

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We Were Wrong About the Right Mix in 2018

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

In 2018 we described our Shootout Winner this way:

Amazing sound throughout for Neil’s self-titled debut – shootout winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides. Both sides are rich, full and Tubey Magical with a big bottom end and excellent resolution.

Surely one of Neil’s toughest to find with top quality sound – and only these early pressings with the original mix have the potential to sound as good as this one does.

Six years later, in 2024, we had acquired enough copies of Neil’s debut to do the shootout again. (Yes, it seems that you may have to wait years for a chance to buy a Hot Stamper pressing of the album from us. However, feel free to use the stamper information provided in the blog listing linked here to help you avoid some of the worst sounding stampers of them all, the earliest ones.

To be clear, some of the later label reissues that come in the second cover are even worse sounding than the first mix stamper pressings that come in the first cover.

(A great deal more on the superior sound of some reissues can be found at the bottom of this listing.)

UPDATE 2024

In our latest shootout, the original mix on multiple copies we played did poorly.

We were wrong and for that we apologize. Please ignore what we wrote about the album below back in 2018. The old mix definitely does not beat the new mix.

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Letter of the Week – “My brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Midnight Blue.

Hi Tom,
I used the first track to compare this Super Hot Stamper pressing I bought to a ’63 original to the Music Matters pressing. This was kind of interesting.

The Music Matters is total junk, as it is completely lifeless. It just has that lifeless audiophile feel. So I’ll just take the MM right out of the equation.

My brain is used to the original pressing’s sound, which is more raw sounding.

The SHS is, simply put,way more of everything!

So much so that I had to turn the gain down… my brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers. The tubeyness factor is way way higher than the original. I eventually acclimated and turned it back up.

The original just has that sound that makes me think of long ago, and it is quite vibrant. Perhaps after some dozen listenings I will put it in the sell pile, but not quite yet.

Very happy to have this amazingly lush sounding LP.

Take Care, Michel

Michel,

It’s hard to imagine that you will be able to listen to the original “ear” pressing a dozen times. We never cared for it. Compared to the later pressings we sell it’s just too crude. (That may be what you actually mean by “raw”.)

Rudy would go on to recut the record much better down the road, and those are, in our experience, unbeatable.

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Highway 61 Revisited – Not So Good on Sundazed in Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

I don’t think mono works for this Highway 61, so we never carried this Sundazed pressing, and we certainly would not have recommended it back in the days when we were still selling Heavy Vinyl, which we officially stopped doing in 2011).

Stick with the 360 stereo pressings for the best sound. (Other 360 pressings that win shootouts can be found here.)

To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that sound better in mono, click here.

Dylan Discography

Here you will find his albums through 1989, after which you are on your own. The later recordings have never sounded right to us and we have no plans to do shootouts for any of them.

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