*Record Mysteries

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.

Naturally we think audiophiles who believe any of the above are as wrong as wrong can be. And you can easily prove to yourself just how misguided they are simply by ordering one of our Hot Stamper pressings and playing it.

You can send it back — that’s up to you — but at least you will know how full of it these audiophile reviewers must be to write such nonsense. We love Rudy and make no bones about it. He is one of the All Time Greats.

Our notes for a recent shootout are shown below. There were six pressings in all, each of them mastered by RVG himself, which unsurprisingly are the only ones with any hope of sounding good, if our experience can act as a guide.

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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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What’s More Important – The Right Label or the Right Stamper Numbers?

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

In this case, since the label is different but the stampers are the same, it’s the label that tells you how good your pressing may — heavy accent on the may — sound.

Lately we’ve been having exceptionally good luck with the early label pressings of many of the London violin concerto records we’ve done shootouts for.

However, the notes you see below do not belong to the wonderful Sibelius record pictured here.

They belong to another London record. We give out lots of bad stampers on this blog, but almost never do we give out the good ones. (When we do give out the best stampers, we usually keep the title a mystery, as is the case of the record here. To see the other titles whose Shootout Winning stampers have been revealed, please click here. The list to date is short but not to worry, more are on their way.)

The amazingly good sounding pressing on the early label took the recording to another level. Our shootout notes read:

  • Amazing violin sound and performance.
  • Very dynamic and realistic.
  • So much subtlety.

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Caribou Is Usually Noisy and Sounds Bad, But Why?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

There’s a good reason you’ve practically never seen this album for sale on our site. In fact there are quite a number of good reasons.

The first one is bad vinyl — most DJM pressings of Caribou are just too noisy to sell. They can look perfectly mint and play noisy as hell; it’s not abuse, it’s bad vinyl.

Empty Sky is the same way; out and out bad vinyl, full of noise, grit and grain.

The second problem is bad sound. Whether it’s bad mastering or bad vinyl incapable of holding onto good mastering, no one can say. Since so many copies were pressed of this monster Number One album (topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic):

  • Perhaps they pressed a few too many after the stampers were worn out.
  • Or pulled too many stampers off the mother.
  • Or made too many stampers from the father.
  • Or used crap vinyl right from the start.

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WW, LW, JW? Which Stampers Sound the Best?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2005 we acquired more than a dozen sealed copies of a popular Warner Bros. title, how I don’t remember. (For now we are keeping that title, and even the band that recorded it, a mystery. It might have been The Doobie Brothers, but then again, it might not.)

Our story goes like this:

Knowing that no two of these pressings would sound exactly the same, we decided to crack them open, clean them up and play them.

2005 was very early in the development of Hot Stamper Shootouts. By 2007 we were much better at them, and not coincidentally, that is also the year we decided that Heavy Vinyl pressings were just not good enough for us to bother selling.

All three of the major stamper prefixes for Warners were represented in the various matrix numbers: WW, JW and LW. Once we started to play them it quickly became clear that most copies of this record just do not sound very good.

The typical copy is hard, midrangy, opaque, dull and badly lacks Tubey Magic.

Only one of the prefixes — WW, JW, LW — actually has any hope of sounding good, and surprisingly it’s not the one I would have expected it to be. Live and learn, right?

We liked either JW or WW back in 2005, I don’t remember which, but the evidence we compiled over the ensuing twenty years contradicted that finding.

Live and learn is right, because since the dark days of 2005, we have done this shootout many times, at least five by my count, and it turns out that the stampers we tend to like are exactly the ones we tend to like in general for Warner Bros.

Here is the full stamper sheet from a shootout we did not long ago laying out the stampers we like for this mystery title: LW, with low numbers.

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Symphonie Fantastique – Three Mastering Options

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we played a reissue of the title you see pictured which prompted us to make some observations and ask some questions about the approach the mastering engineer might have taken.

And this one comes complete with the bonus 7″ entitled “Berlioz Takes a Trip,” in which Bernstein explores the work “with musical illustrations by the New York Philharmonic.”

Clocking in at around 45 minutes, Symphonie Fantastique is a difficult work to fit onto a single LP,  which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record:

  1. Compress the dynamics,
  2. Lower the level, or
  3. Filter the deep bass.

On this side two it seems that none of those approaches were taken by the engineer who cut this record in the early 80s — there’s plenty of bass, as well as powerful dynamics, and the levels seem fine.

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

What’s Your Theory Then?

Side one, however, is bass shy. Did the engineer filter out the lower frequencies, or is it just a case of pressing variation being the culprit. Who can say?

If we had many more copies with these same stampers for side one, all with less bass, we might be able to draw a conclusion about that, one that might be highly probable but of course not dispositive, black swans being a regular part of our experience.

The very next copy we might find with those stampers could have plenty of bass.

Then we would be forced to say that our highly probable theory had been falsified conclusively.

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What Exactly Does Van Gelder Stamped in the Deadwax Tell You?

Hot Stamper Pressings of CTI Titles Available Now

The section of the stamper sheet we wrote up after our most recent shootout belongs to George Benson’s White Rabbit album, the one released by CTI in 1972.

We think these stampers illustrate an important reality regarding the variability of record pressings, and it’s one that we run into on regularly during shootouts.

Keep in mind that the notes you see were made without the listener knowing what the stamper numbers were for the copy being evaluated. Some relevant facts:

  • Rudy Van Gelder cut all the original domestic pressings for the album that we played in our shootout since those are the only ones we know of to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. (Hint: forget the reissues, imports, etc.)
  • The stampers for the two copies you see below were the two worst performers out of the six we had to work with. (We started out with more than six copies to audition. Unfortunately, some of the copies we clean and play get tossed out during the shootout for having noise issues — scratches that play, bad vinyl, inner groove distortion, etc. Noisy copies of  fairly common jazz records are not saleable no matter how good they sound.)
  • The top pressing shown below earned good, not great Hot Stamper grades of 1.5+ on both sides. This is the minimal rating any Hot Stamper pressing must earn to be offered to our customers. As you can see, A12/B2 are the stampers for this pressing.
  • There was another A12 side one in our shootout that did slightly better, earning a 2+ grade. The pressing you see at the bottom also had an A12 side one, but it did not make the grade. (The N/A means we didn’t play side two of that copy because the 1+ side one makes the record not worth the bother.)

We know that White Rabbit is an outstanding George Benson album, recorded by the immensely talented Rudy Van Gelder himself. All the original pressings were mastered by him as well. We’ve been doing shootouts for the album for more than a decade and in that time have heard some amazing sounding copies. I don’t recall one ever being returned, for any reason.

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Is It Hard for You to Imagine Similar Stampers Sounding So Different?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Subtitle: it’s also hard to imagine that space and time are two aspects of the same reality, spacetime, but that’s why we employ rigorous scientific methods to test our theories and — in some cases — prove ourselves wrong.

We here at Better Records like testing records. We want to know if the predictions we make about the titles we play are accurate, which is simply to say, do they match the data derived from our blinded shootouts?

In the case of the stampers for this mystery title, it turns out that whatever intuitions we may have had going in would have been no help at all. Who could possibly predict that, for sound quality on side one, 13s would substantially beat 12s, 12s would beat 15s, and that 15s would beat 11s.

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Graham Nash’s Wild Tales and Their Mysteries Many and Deep

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

What hurts so many pressings of this album is a generally lifeless quality and a lack of presence in the midrange.

Were the stampers a bit worn for those copies, or no good to start with, or was it bad vinyl that couldn’t hold the energy of the stamper, or perhaps some stampers just weren’t cut right?

Maybe it’s something as simple as the pressing plates going out of alignment at some point in the cycle?

Don’t ask us. We sure don’t know. And one thing we’ve learned over the years is not to pretend to.

These are record mysteries, and they are mysteries that will always be mysteries, if for no other reason than the number of production variables hopelessly intertwined at the moment of a pressing’s creation can never be teased apart no matter how smart you are.

As we never tire of saying, thinking is really not much help with regard to finding better sounding records.

Not surprisingly, we’ve found that cleaning and playing them seems to work fairly well.

Those two things work fairly well because nothing else works at all.

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Could This Be the Sound Audiophiles Complain About with Vintage Pressings?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Red Garland Available Now

A rare and expensive (!) early stereo pressing that we played in a recent shootout for Bright and Breezy was passable at best.

As you can see from the notes reproduced below, we found the sound to be “sweet, relaxed, but badly veiled and lacking weight and bass.” (Note that records without a 1.5+ grade or better on both sides are not considered Hot Stamper pressings.)

In other words, it sounded too much like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them. (For this album, clearly the best sound is found on the right OJC.)

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