Pressings with Good, Not Great Sound

These are records that we auditioned and found to have good, not great, sound quality. If a record earns a Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+ on both sides, it is a very good sounding record, but it is a far cry from the best pressings that we’ve played in shootouts.

On Reggatta de Blanc, Steer Clear of Bilbo

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sting and The Police Available Now

A White Hot Stamper shootout winning copy went up on the site recently (4/2025) and this is how we described it:

With INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish, this copy is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Regatta de Blanc you’ve heard.

Most of the stuff we manage to acquire from overseas is in far worse playing condition – these were popular records in their day, and they got played plenty, so this one came as a pleasant surprise.

Sting’s pulsing bass lines and the massive assault of Copeland’s kick really come to life here – you won’t believe how big and powerful the bass is on this record.

Along with Ghost in the Machine, we think this album captures The Police at their songwriting and performing peak.

However, many of the copies we played left much to be desired, as you can see from the notes we made for two of the copies we played (out of a total of nine):

Bilbo has cut many of our favorite records over the years, but for this album his side two is way too bright and therefore NFG.

Sheffield Labs Mastering (SLM) also cut many great sounding records, but for this album the sound was “very thin.” The grade of 1.5+ means the record is playable and enjoyable, but the top copies we offer will be dramatically better sounding.

Tone (not pictured) is a British mastering house that has mastered many excellent pressings. In the case of Reggatta they can be very good, but they never win shootouts.

British, Dutch or Domestic?

The first two can be good.

The domestic copies are consistently sub-par, as is the Half-Speed, and whatever Heavy Vinyl pressings are available are sure to be mediocre at best, as that has been our experience with the hundreds and hundreds of such pressings we have played to date.

Some of the most recent ones we’ve played were especially bad sounding. When it comes to Heavy Vinyl, devolution seems to be the operating principle.

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On this Mystery London, The Reissues Have Lately Been Letting Us Down

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Decca Available Now

The record you see pictured is not the record we will be discussing in this post.

The stamper numbers and grades you see below belong to a different album.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, in some cases including the actual stamper sheets compiled from the shootout — winners, losers, and everything in between — but for now we are keeping this title close to the vest.

This pressing was not as bad as many of the golden age classical titles we play. (See links below.)

Although it has the potential to sound amazingly good on the early labels, the second label London pressings never seem to do much better than 1.5+, a barely passing Hot Stamper grade.

It’s small, stuck in the speakers, and had no real top end. We judge the best pressings on the second label with these stampers to have good, not great sound quality.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy.

That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording this London can be on the best early pressings.

To see more records that earned the 1.5+ grade, please click here. (Incidentally, some of them are even on Heavy Vinyl. The better modern pressings have sometimes, if rarely, been known to earn Hot Stamper grades, and one shocked the hell out of us by actually winning a shootout. Wouldn’t you like to know which one!)

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

Here are reviews for some of the titles we’ve auditioned, 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.

  • London/Decca records with weak sound or performances
  • Mercury records with weak sound or performances
  • RCA records with weak sound or performances

We’ve auditioned countless pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands.

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This Mystery Mercury May Have the Same Stampers on Both Sides, But the Sound Is Very, Very Different

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings (when there are such pressings), in stereo, on the original plum label are the best way to go, right? 

In many cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here. (Both beat the pants off the awful Classic Records pressing.

But sometimes the RFR pressings — which, as I am sure you know, can be the earliest stampers for some titles — are nothing special on one side or the other. That is exactly the case here.

Keep in mind that the stamper numbers you see above belong to a different album.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but for now we are keeping the identify of this title close to the vest.

We are not able to predict what stampers will win a shootout before we actually sit down to play all our copies.

It turns out that the FR pressings did not sound as good as some of other pressings. The RFR stampers came in somewhere in the middle of the pack, an average of 2+, but a hard record to sell with such very different sounding sides.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.

We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.

I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them, painful and costly as those experiences may have been.

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Van Cliburn’s Live Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 Can Be Very Good But…

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rachmaninoff Available Now

The Shaded Dog pressings of Van Cliburn’s live performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (LSC 2355) we’ve played recently tend to have very good sound.

The problem is that the famous Byron Janis recording of the work for Mercury (SR 90283) has the potential for amazingly good sound.

For a recent shootout winning copy, we had this to say:

The sound is rich and natural, with lovely transparency and virtually no smear to the strings, horns or piano. What an amazing recording! What an amazing piece of music.

The recording is explosively dynamic and on this copy, the sound was positively jumping out of the speakers. In addition, the brass and strings are full-bodied, with practically no stridency, an unusual feat the Mercury engineers seem to have accomplished while in Russia.

Big, rich sound can sometimes present problems for piano recordings. You want to hear the percussive qualities of the instrument, but few copies pull off that trick without sounding thin. This one showed us a piano that was both clear and full-bodied.

With huge amounts of hall space, weight and energy, this is Demo Disco quality sound by any standard. Once the needle has dropped you will quickly forget about the sound (and all the money you paid to get it) and simply find yourself in the presence of some of the greatest musicians of their generation, captured on the greatest analog recordings of all time.

The RCA recording, good as it is, is simply not in the same league as the better pressings of the Mercury.

For that reason we do not feel the need to offer any copies of the Living Stereo record to our customers.

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Hot Stamper Sharing Can’t Get Off the Ground, How Come?

Basic Concepts and Record Realities Explained 

The above link takes you to our blog. Normally such a link would take you to our in-stock Hot Stamper pressings on the site for the band in question, but we rarely have any Traffic albums to sell these days, which is the case as of this writing.

Finding just the right Traffic pressings, with audiophile-quality vinyl no less, requires effort and resources that we just haven’t been committing to lately. We hope to do better in 2025.

In 2014 somebody on the Hoffman forum tried to get a Hot Stamper thread going under this heading: cheap Hot Stampers revealed.

The thread:

“If you have a “hot stamper” record – one that smokes and takes no prisoners, I mean a BADASS pressing, show it here with matrix info, label or other identifying features so we can all hunt with a bit of a head-start.

“I know these records are out there, just looking for a place to show off their analog glory.

“Here is a recent find that fits the bill and then some:

“Traffic: Best Of Traffic UK.

“Matrix # ILPS 9112 A-1/B-1”

OK, let’s talk about this Island reissue. We know the record well. If it sounds the way the copies we played over the years have sounded, we would say it can be good, not great, and if it qualified for Hot Stamper status, it might — might — earn a plus and a half at best. (1.5+.)

We don’t even bother to pick them up at any price these days, if that tells you anything.

He got very little support in his endeavor. The thread closed after a while with practically nothing in it.

Could it be that the folks on the Hoffman forum have a poor grasp of the amount of effort, time and money it takes to find Hot Stampers?

And, having committed to neither the effort, the time nor the money, find that they have nothing of any value to contribute to such a list?  

Yes, that could be. That definitely could be. Thank god it doesn’t keep them from criticizing those of us who, working in concert with a staff of ten or so, have devoted ourselves to the task and found them by the thousands.

By the way, we know that Traffic title very well. The Pink Label original is by far the best pressing in our experience. No copy we have ever heard on the label promoted by this poster would qualify as much more than a bargain Hot Stamper in comparison to the Pink Label and Pink Rim label pressings that we sell, although of course, not having heard his copy, we can’t say it’s not fabulous. 

It’s just not very likely to be fabulous. 

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Talk About Getting the Sound Wrong – What Was Decca Thinking?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Even though we know that the UK Decca pressings have not done well in our shootouts for more years than I care to remember, if we see one for cheap locally you know we’re going to buy it and get it another chance at the brass ring no matter how many times it’s failed in the past.

As you can see from our shootout notes, the Decca import has once again let us down.

It’s bright, with no warmth or weight. It’s not musical like the London pressings with the right stampers are.

If a certain kind of audiophile were to play this record, the kind of audiophile who might be given to simplistic conclusions based on insufficiently small sets of data — which, in our experience, pretty much covers the entire audiophile record collector community, including, if not especially, the so-called expert reviewers — the conclusion such a person might reach is that Beggars Banquet is just not very well recorded.

If Decca pressings don’t sound good, what on earth would?

Or, to put it another way, if Decca, the label that the Stones recorded this album for, can’t figure out how to make Beggars sound its best, why would we assume that any other company could?

We would, naturally, assume that Decca did the best they could with the tape and the mediocre quality of the sound you hear — 1+/1.5+ is pretty much our definition of mediocre — is all there is.

The Option that Is Almost Always Wrong

Worse — if a new Heavy Vinyl pressing of the album came out with even halfway-decent sound, then it would prove beyond a doubt that some modern mastering engineer had finally figured out how to get Beggars to sound right.

But of course it would prove no such thing.

If all you have to guide you is conventional collector wisdom, then the one thing you can be sure of is that the Decca pressing from the UK should have better sound than any other, especially any record made in the states.

But it doesn’t. It’s possible I suppose – we haven’t played every pressing ever made – but it sure is unlikely based on the evidence presented to our ears over the course of the last twenty to thirty years or so.

If you would like to hear Beggars Banquet sound right, and have the hundreds of dollars we charge for a copy that is guaranteed to sound right or your money back, click on the link. It’s rare that we have one in stock, but you never know.

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Maazel’s Pines of Rome Is Another Title Not Fit for a Super Disc List

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Pines of Rome Available Now

Sonic Grade: C (at best)

I found a bit of commentary in a listing for Scheherazade, and right away it was clear to me that the shootout we did for that title showed us a recording that had much in common with the one we had done more recently for The Pines of Rome.

Here it is, with the necessary changes having been made.

We did a monster shootout for this music in 2021, one we had been planning for more than twenty years. On hand were quite a few copies of the Reiner on RCA; the Ansermet on London; the Maazel on Decca and London (the Decca being on the TAS List), the Kempe on Readers Digest, and quite a few others we felt had potential.

The only recordings that held up all the way through — the last movement being a real Ball Breaker, for both the engineers and musicians — were those by Reiner and Kempe. This was disappointing considering how much time and money we spent finding, cleaning and playing about twenty or so other pressings.

We learned from that first big go around something that we think will remain true for the foreseeable future: the 1960 Reiner recording with the Chicago Symphony on RCA just can’t be beat.

Could other pressings be better sounding? Of course they could.

Would we ever buy another copy? Not a chance.

The notes for the Decca pressing I played, mastered by G, Ted Burkett, can be seen above.

Hey, here’s an idea.

Why don’t you buy a bunch of them and see if any of them do not have the problems described on my notes.

If you find a good one, please let me know the stampers so I can go out and find one myself.

The above is of course all in good fun. We both know that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that anyone reading this commentary is going to go out and buy some Decca pressings of The Pines of Rome, clean them up, play them one by one and then critique their strengths and weaknesses.

The most likely thing is that, if you have any Decca pressing of Maazel’s Pines, it’s sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Odds are it has not been played in a very long time.

Which should tell you something. Good records get played and bad ones sit on shelves.

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How Does the D1/D1 Jazz Giant Black Label Pressing Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

Even though the Black label original of Jazz Gianot we played in our shootout held its own well enough, it did suffer from a slight case of “old record” sound.

Head to head with the best vintage reissues, it was a bit crude, didn’t extend fully on the top end, and wasn’t as resolving in the midrange.

The fact that it earned a Super Hot (A++) sonic grade means that it could not have sounded too much like an old record. It was still doing most everything right.

It just had a few sonic shortcomings we recognized were holding it back.

The reissues that beat it in the shootout showed us just how good the album could sound, maybe not night and day better, but definitely better, a full grade better.

The Black Label original we played would still beat the pants off the godawful Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl pressing that came out in the 90s, the one mastered by the formerly-brilliant Doug Sax.

For those who may not have been collecting back then, we describe in great detail the bad sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressing that AP produced for their version of Way Out West in 1992.

Mobile Fidelity got into the reissue act in 1994, making murky-sounding records on 200 gram vinyl and calling them Anadisqs.

Classic Records started producing their bright, screechy reissues of Living Stereo titles that year as well.

It seems a lot of bad sounding records were being made back then!

Is it any different now? (If it is, please contact me at tom@better-records.com and tell me what you think the differences are. I am at a loss after playing these six Heavy Vinyl titles in 2024 and finding that all of them fell well short of the mark. What mark is that, you ask? Why, the mark set by their vintage counterparts.)

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Acoustic Sounds Was Selling This Ridiculously Bad “TAS List” Record Back in the Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

This commentary was written circa 2001. 

I remember 15 years ago when Acoustic Sounds was selling the then in-print 25th Anniversary Island pressing (with 7U stampers as I recall) for $15, claiming that it was a TAS List record. If you’ve ever heard the pressing, you know it has no business going anywhere near a Super Disc List. It’s mediocre at best and has virtually none of the magic of the good originals.

NEWSFLASH: Just looked it up on Discogs, a site that did not exist when I wrote this commentary. My memory is apparently better than I thought it was. The 25th Anniversary Island Life Collection pressing came out in 1986.

    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 1): ILPM 9154 A-1 ILPM•9154•A1
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 1): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-1-3
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, variant 2): ILPM 9154 A-8U-1- G10
    • Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, variant 2): ILPM 9154 B-7U-1-

By the way, I am not aware of any of these pressings from the 80s being especially good sounding. I remember playing some of them but I don’t remember liking any of them. They were cheap reissues that satisfied those looking for import vinyl, not audiophile quality sound.

I refused to sell it back in those days, for no other reason than the fact that it’s far from a Better Sounding Record. I don’t like misrepresenting records and I don’t like ripping off my customers. It’s bad for business.

That pressing was a fraud and I was having none of it.

Chad probably didn’t even know the difference.

When you don’t know much about records, you can say all sorts of things and not get called out for them. Audiophiles are a credulous bunch and always have been. They still believe the same nonsense that I foolishly fell for back in the 80s. (And I admit that even as late as 2006 I was still a fan of certain Heavy Vinyl pressings.)

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We Were Way Off the Mark with this Rodrigo Recording in 2010

More of the music of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999)

In 2010 we did a shootout for this title and thought we had found a good one. We wrote:

A good side one backed with a lovely side two! We shot out a stack of these recently and side two of this copy was one of the few sides that really impressed us. The sound is transparent and full of energy. Side one is pretty good but a bit crude in the louder passages.

This is a wonderful record. The performance here by the first family of guitar is legendary. More importantly, the music is delightful and belongs in any serious classical collection.

RFR-1 stampers. What the best originals like this one give you is immediacy. The attack of the guitar is more real.

Comparing this with the Golden Import shows you that some of the transients are smoothed over on that pressing.

If you’ve got the front end that can deal with the Mercury upper midrange and transient attack, the strings will sound textured and clear, not harsh or shrill. (A badly mastered version of this record would make your ears bleed.)

More importantly, this copy captures the sounds of the guitars perfectly. I doubt if anybody could do it as well as Mercury.

Recently we did the shootout again and came up with very different findings:

Now those same stampers are tubey and weighty, but the strings are too hot (bright and shrill) and flat (lacking richness).

We can sum up the sound of these stampers — on a different copy of course, something to keep in mind — in one word:

Ouch.

Please allow us to help you avoid making the same mistakes we did:

  • More records with bright sound can be found here
  • More records with flat sound can be found here

What’s So Golden About These Imports Anyway?

And by the way, we would never even bother to reserve the studio time to play a Golden Import pressing these days. I can count on one hand the titles that actually sound good to me and it’s just not worth the labor to find the one out of fifty that has hi-fidelity sound as we currently define it.

This commentary gets at our disappointed feelings about the label.

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