Testing Transparency

Can you “see” into the space of the recording? Transparent records are the ones that allow you to do that.

Neil Young and His Crazy Pals LIVE in the Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Hot Stampers are all about finding those rare and very special pressings that manage to represent the master tape at its best.

Notice I did not say ACCURATELY represent the master tape, because the master tape may have faults that need to be corrected, and the only way to do that is in the mastering phase.

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that absolute fidelity to the master tape should never be — and more importantly, rarely is — the goal of the engineer mastering a record.

Which, as a practical matter, means two things:

  1. Flat transfers are most often a mistake.
  2. Talking about the fidelity you think a record has to its master tape, a tape you have never heard, is completely pointless.

Whether we like or dislike the presentation of any given recording is of course a matter of taste. When listening we constantly make judgments about the way we think the recording at any moment ought to sound, based on what we like or don’t like about the sound of recordings in general and how our stereos deal with them.

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Listening in Depth to Houses of the Holy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

You really get an understanding of just how much of a production genius Jimmy Page was when you listen to a copy of Houses on high quality modern equipment, the kind that simply did not exist when the record came out in 1973.

To take just one example, listen to how clearly the multi-tracked guitars can be heard in the different layers and areas of the soundstage. On some songs you will have no trouble picking out three, four and even more guitars playing, each with its own unique character. The clarity of the better copies allows you to recognize — perhaps for the first time — the special contribution each is making to the finished song.

Side One

The Song Remains the Same
The Rain Song

Check out the guitars — the sound should be warm, sweet and delicate. There are some dead quiet passages in this song that are almost always going to have some surface noise. Most copies start out a bit noisy but almost always get quieter as the music goes along.

Over the Hills and Far Away

This is a great test track for side one. It starts with lovely acoustic guitars before the Monster Zep Rock Chords come crashing in. If both parts of the song sound correct and balanced, you more than likely have a winner. And the bigger the dynamic contrast between the parts the better.

Turn your volume up good and high in order to get the full effect, then stand back and let the boys have at it.

The Crunge (more…)

What Do You Mean by “These Swan Lake Highlights Sound Like Live Music”?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

Kenneth Wilkinson engineered this album of Swan Lake Highlights for Decca in 1961 (one of the truly great years for top quality analog recordings).

Judging by the best pressings we played in our shootout, he did a great job. Knowing his work the way we do, this was to be expected. There are about 50 of his recordings for which we have done Hot Stamper shootouts, probably more than for any other engineer, and there are sure to be more added in the years to come.

It’s as wide, deep, and three-dimensional as any, which is, of course, all to the good, but what makes the sound of these recordings so special is the timbral accuracy of the instruments in every section.

Highlights of the recording include huge amounts of bass; a clear snare at the back of the hall (a good test for transparency, of both the record and of your system and room); full-bodied horns and strings, which never become blary or shrill; and of course huge amounts of space.

This is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your heavy vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage. They cannot begin to sound the way this record sounds. (Before you put them in storage or on Ebay please play them against this pressing so that you can be confident in your decision to rid yourself of their mediocrity.)

Quality record production is a lost art, and it’s been lost for a very long time.

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Expanding Space Itself on The Dark Side of the Moon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pink Floyd’s Albums Available Now

Many years ago, right around 2015 I believe, we played a copy with all the presence, all the richness, all the size and all the energy we could have ever hoped to hear on a pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

It did it all and then some.

The raging guitar solos (there are three of them) on Money seemed to somehow expand the system itself, making it bigger and more powerful than I had ever heard.

Even our best copies of Blood Sweat and Tears have never managed to create such a huge space with that kind of raw power. This copy broke through all the barriers, taking the stereo system to an entirely new level of sound.

Listen to the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage on this copy that I’ve never heard as clearly before. On most copies you can’t even tell they are there.

Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve never heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion on this track.

One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, do no more than hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. When you don’t — the reason we do shootouts in a nutshell — it’s not.

The best sounding parts of this record are nothing less than ASTONISHING. Money is the best example I can think of for side two. When you hear the sax player rip into his solo as Money gets rockin’, it’s almost SCARY! He’s blowin’ his brains out in a way that has never, in my experience anyway, been captured on a piece of plastic. After hearing this copy, I remembered exactly why we felt this album must rank as one of the five best Rock Demo Discs to demonstrate the superiority of analog. There is no CD, and there will never be a CD, that sounds like this.

In fact, when you play the other “good sounding” copies, you realize that the sound you hear is what would naturally be considered as good as this album could get. But now we know better. This pressing took Dark Side to places we never imagined it could go.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Rhythms of the South Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Exotica and Bachelor Pad Recordings Available Now

There are some records that, no matter how amazing the sound, and how good the music is, simply will not find favor with our customers. This is one of them. I happen to like the music, and the sound is shockingly good, a true Demo Disc for those of you with big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a spacious, heavily treated room like the one you see below.

We are most likely not going to be doing shootouts for this title in the future, so we thought we would share with everyone what we know about the record, which boils down to which stampers have the potential to do well and which do not.

As you can see, Stan Goodall did a much better job mastering the early Blueback London pressings for Decca than Jack Law.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?

The originals all have the same Blueback cover.

In this case, the stamper numbers are the only way to separate the potential winners from the sure losers.

11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 3 3 1E 1E other copies: 2.5/2, 2/2.5
11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 1.5 1 2D 2D s1 dry, flat, trashy. s2 smeary, messy, boring
RE ABOVE: I FOUND THIS IN A BOX. THOUGHT IT SOUNDED REALLY GREAT, ESP. T1, S1

Jack Law’s cutting for side one was

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Listening in Depth to Sinead O’Connor’s Brilliant Second Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sinead O’Connor Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

This is widely considered one of the best albums of the ’90s, a brilliant and unique piece of work. I positively love this album. The emotion is every bit as naked and compelling as that found on Joni’s Blue, and I do not say that lightly. I know the power of Blue, and this album has that kind of power. This is some heavy heavy stuff. Hearing it sound as good as it does on the right UK pressings is a thrill I won’t soon forget.

Side One

Feel So Different
I Am Stretched on Your Grave

This track has some of the wildest instrumentation I’ve ever heard. The rhythm is provided by a looped sample of the beat from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” with Sinead’s reverb-laden vocals carrying the droning melody. At the apex of the track, some crazy-ass violins come in, making for a haunting celtic/hip-hop hybrid. I think there’s even some Persian in there. This one just knocks me out every time I hear it.

The average bad sounding pressing of side one just plain ruins this track. The sound will lack extension on the top and reek of blubbery bass. The hot copies have solid low end, lots of air around the vocals, and texture on the violins. The good copies let the song work its magic; the bad ones don’t.

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Lincoln and Doug Produced The Audiophile Sgt. Pepper of Its Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Lincoln Mayorga Available Now

When I was selling audio equipment back in the 70s (Audio Research, Fulton speakers), The Missing Linc this was a favorite Demo Disc in our store.

With a big speaker like the Fulton J, the bass drum at the end of track two would shake the walls. At the time I had never heard a record with bass that went remotely that deep. (The album came out in 1972. I’m guessing I probably first heard a copy in ’75 or ’76 when I bought my Fultons, which would have been sometime in my early twenties.)

Every bit as amazing to me was the string quartet on side 2. You could actually hear the musicians breathing and turning the pages on their music stands, just as if you were actually in their “living presence.” No recording I had ever owned allowed me to hear that level of natural detail.

This is one of the albums that made me realize how good audio in the home could be.

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Getting the Balance Right on Mean to Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now

Mean to Me is a favorite test track for side one, with real Demo Disc quality sound. We credit it with helping us dramatically improve our playback.

Roy DuNann at Contemporary was able to get all his brass players together in one room, sounding right as a group as well as individual voices.

The piano, bass, and drums that accompany them are perfectly woven into the fabric of the arrangement.

What makes this song so good is that when the brass really starts to let loose later in the song, with the right equipment and the right room, you can get the kind of sound that’s so powerful you could practically swear it’s live.

Helen was recorded in a booth for this album, and her voice is slightly veiled relative to the other musicians playing in the much larger room that of course would be required for so many players.

When you get the brass correct, the trick is to get her voice to become as transparent and palpable as possible without screwing up the tonality of the brass instruments.

The natural inclination is to brighten up the sound to make her voice more clear.

But you will quickly be made painfully aware that brighter is not better when the brass gets too “hot” and starts to tear your head off.

The balance between voice and brass is key to the proper reproduction of this album.

Once you have achieved that balance, tweak for transparency while guarding against too much upper midrange or top end. Which also means watch out for audiophile wires that may have fooled you into thinking they were more resolving when actually they were just peakier in some portion of the frequency range.

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Botnick and Levine Knocked Equinox Out of the Park

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

The music is of course wonderful, but what separates Sergio from practically all of his ’60s contemporaries is the AMAZING SOUND of his recordings. Like their debut, this one was engineered by the team of Bruce Botnick and Larry Levine.

Botnick is of course the man behind the superb recordings of The Doors, Love and others too numerous to mention. 

Levine is no slouch either, having engineered one of the best sounding albums on the planet, Sergio Mendes’ Stillness.

Just play the group’s amazing versions of Watch What Happens, Night and Day, or Jobim’s Wave to hear the kind of Mendes Magic that makes us swoon. For audiophiles it just doesn’t get any better. (Well, almost. Stillness is still the Ultimate, on the level of a Dark Side of the Moon or Tea for the Tillerman, but Equinox is right up there with it.)

Only the best copies are sufficiently transparent to let the listener hear all the elements laid out clearly, with each occupying a real three-dimensional space within the soundfield. When you hear one of those copies, you have to give Botnick and Levine their due. These guys knew what they were doing like few that have come along since.

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On this Jazz, Transparency Is Key

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Ry Cooder Available Now

The best copies realistically convey the live in the studio quality of the sound. This is a tight ensemble working at the top of their game, no surprise there — Ry surrounds himself with nothing but the best.

But the better copies have such amazingly transparent sound you can’t help feeling as though you really are in the presence of live human beings. You really get the sense of actual fingers plucking those guitar strings. You hear mouths blowing air through horns and woodwinds.

These are sounds that most recordings pretend to capture, and like hypnotist’s subjects, we go along for the ride. This recording has the potential to actually bring forth that living, breathing musician sound, no imagination required.

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for this album.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

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