*Helpful 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.

Listening in Depth to Heavy Weather

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Weather Report Available Now

Heavy Weather has some of the biggest, boldest sound we’ve ever heard.

It’s clearly a big speaker Demo Disc. Play this one as loud as you can. The louder you play it, the better it will sound.

The commentary below contains track-by-track advice on what to listen for when auditioning the album.

Side One

Birdland

Not an easy track to get right; there’s so much upper midrange and high frequency information to deal with. If the synthesizers and horns are too much, the effect is exciting but won’t wear well. Too much 6k is the problem on most copies, along with not enough above 10. That is a deadly combination.

A Remark You Made

Such an original composition. This is the band at their unconventional, uncommercial best.

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Folks, This Is Why We Love Vintage Analog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

This is ANALOG at its Tubey Magical finest. You ain’t never gonna play a CD that sounds like this as long as you live. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but digital media are evidently incapable of reproducing this kind of sound. There are nice sounding CDs in the world but there aren’t any that sound like this, not in my experience anyway.

If you are thinking that someday a better digital system is going to come along in order to save you the trouble and expense of having to find and acquire these expensive original pressings, think again.

This is the kind of record that shows you what’s wrong with your BEST sounding CDs. (Best not to talk about the average one in your collection, or mine. The less said the better.)

This is the kind of record that somebody might hear in a stereo store and realize that the digital road he’s been going down for so many years is nothing but a sonic dead end.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame — we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings (that’s partly what makes them Hot Stampers, right?) will rattle the foundation of your house. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense.

It’s big bombastic Prog Rock that wants desperately to rock your world.

At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly.

At loud levels it actually will rock your world.

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We Were Wrong about the Reissues of Christmas with Chet Atkins

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Atkins Available Now

In 2006 we wrote our review for an orange label RCA reissue of the album.

Recently we did a shootout for the album and only one side of one of the later orange label pressings earned a Super Hot (2+) grade.

Our system was noticeably darker and clearly far less revealing than the one we have now, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to compensate for the shortcomings of the reissue reviewed below.

What I couldn’t hear on my system back in those days (and even as late as 2006) no doubt explains most of these kinds of errors. That’s why we are constantly harping on the idea that audiophiles would do well to get good sound before they spend a fortune on vinyl.

Higher quality playback is what makes it possible to recognize and acquire better sounding records.

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Watch Out for Vocals that Are Too Forward on Alice’s Restaurant

More Records with Specific Advice on What to Listen For

It’s not easy to find a copy of this album that sounds right.

Many of the copies we played suffer from a “too-forward” quality to the vocals, which make them positively unpleasant to listen to.

Others lacked presence, which left them easy on the ears but ultimately boring.

Then there were the copies that got the vocals right but just didn’t have all the Tubey Magic you want for this kind of simple, folky music.

I’m not going to go out on a limb and say this is an album everyone needs in their collection, but it’s certainly enjoyable. For those of you who get a kick out of this slice of 60s life, you’re going to have a very hard time finding a copy that sounds as good as this one.

It’s nice when the copy in hand has all the transparency, space, layered depth and three-dimensionality that makes listening to records such a fundamentally different experience than listening to digitally-sourced material, but it’s not nearly as important as having that rich, relaxed tonal balance.

A little smear and a subtle lack of resolution is not the end of the world on most of the records we sell, including this one.

Brightness and leanness, along with grit and grain on the vocals, can be.

If the average record sounded even close to right, nobody would need us to find good sounding copies for them. They’d be sitting in every record bin in town and we would have to find some other kinds of records to sell.

The records may indeed be in every bin in town — that’s where we found the copies that went into this shootout — but the sound sure isn’t.

Hint: for the best sound, stick to the Tri-Tone original Reprise pressings. They win every shootout.

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Coltrane’s Sound – Forget the 70s Reissues

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

This is yet another superb Tom Dowd recording of Coltrane in his prime, with support from the brilliant McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.

Just don’t bother with the later Red and Green Atlantic pressings.

Every one we’ve ever played was flat, dry, and thin. They sound like most of the cheap reissues that Atlantic churned out in the ’70s.

Don’t get me wrong; there are some good sounding records on the Red and Green label, but you really have to know what you are doing — or be really lucky — to find them.

We’ve played them by the score, and found relatively few winners among a slough of losers. If you want to take your chances on some, knock yourself out, more power to you, but expect to come up with nothing to show for your time and money almost every time. That’s been our experience anyway.

And be very thankful if you happen to run into one of these early Atlantic stereo pressings, especially if it plays quietly. Few Classic Coltrane albums survived the jazz lovers of the day and their awful turntables.

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Elvis Costello / Spike

More of the Music of Elvis Costello

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish, this copy is doing most everything right – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This early import pressing showed us a Spike we never knew existed – there was so much energy and presence that it just came jumping out of the speakers and simply refused to mind its manners. Elvis should be proud. Why don’t more records sound like this?
  • “Any King’s Shilling” on side two with its authentic Irish instrumentation (fiddle, uilleann pipes, Irish harp, bodhran) has Demo Disc quality sound of the highest order
  • One of the best batches of songs Elvis (and his buddy Paul McCartney) ever wrote – the combination of such good sound and such good music makes this the last of the great Elvis records from an audiophile perspective
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

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Letter of the Week – “From the moment the needle went down, I was blown away.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased many, many years ago:

Hey Tom, 

Wow. Most impressive, Tom.

From the moment the needle went down, I was blown away.

Really, really happy with this record.

-g

Dear Sir,

When you hear the good British early pressings of Electric Warrior, it is clearly a Demo Disc of the highest order, with dramatically more Tubey Magic, space and richness that any record we know of made in the decade of the 80s or thereafter.

That sound is gone and it shows no sign of ever coming back.

More on the sound of the best pop and rock recordings of the Seventies here.

 

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Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2025.

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another mistaken idea.

We evaluated an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last.

The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played.

We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Not sure what those two commas are doing there. Pausing for emphasis? Sure, why not? This is a big deal.

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is truly one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He might be, or at least he might choose to describe himself as one.

Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.

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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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The Glorious Big Speaker Sound of Wind of Change

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Frampton Available Now

A while back we discussed the kind of sound that Glyn Johns managed to get for the likes of Humble Pie and The Who:

But oh what a glorious sound it is when it’s working. There’s not a trace of anything phony up top, down low or anywhere in-between. This means it has a quality sorely at odds with the vast majority of audiophile pressings, new and old, as well as practically anything recorded in the last twenty years, and it is simply this: The louder you play it, the better it sounds.

Chris Kimsey knew how to get the Big Rock Sound onto tape about as well as anybody who ever lived. His work on this album set me on a path I would would follow for the next fifty years.

Wind of Change is the very definition of a big speaker record, one that requires the highest-resolution, lowest-distortion components to bring out its best qualities. If you have a system like that, you should find much to like here.

I bought my first copy in 1972 while still in high school and it quickly became one of my favorite records.

All these years later it still is.

It’s records like this that shaped my audio purchases and pursuits. It takes a monster system to even begin to play this record right, and that’s the kind of stereo I’ve always been drawn to.

A stereo that can’t play this record, or The Beatles, or Ambrosia, or Yes, or the hundreds of other amazing recordings we put up on the site every year, is not one I would want to own.

This is Peter Frampton’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.

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