*Pressing Advice, by Title

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

(more…)

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.

(more…)

3s Can Have Amazingly Good Sound, or 3s Can Have Mediocre Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?

Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.

A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.

As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

There’s a Very Good Chance We Were Wrong about Mulligan Meets Getz

More of the Music of Stan Getz /More of the Music of Gerry Mulligan

This is an album that we were probably wrong about in 2021 when the following Hot Stamper two-pak pressing went up for sale on the site. (The pressings we liked at the time are long gone by now.) Here is what we wrote back then:

Mulligan and Getz’s 1957 collaboration arrives on the site with this superb 2-pack offering Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner

Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory

Practically impossible to find in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces – it took two different pressings to get two good sides, and they are very good indeed

The reissues we discovered in 2025 trounced the originals (in both stereo and mono) as well as the early reissues (on the Verve T Label) we played in our shootout, as you can see from the stamper sheet notes below:

Our mistaken judgment is simply the result of ignorance. In 2021 we simply had no idea just how good this recording could sound on vintage vinyl. We hadn’t done our homework properly, and because of that we came up with the wrong answer.

We only discovered the right pressings, with the right stampers, pressed in the right era, and mastered by the right guy, sometime in 2024 or so. We bought a bunch of those and in 2025 did the shootout with all kinds of copies, just to keep everybody honest.

That was the year much better sounding reissue copies that look like the one you see on the left came along. As we noted in the listing:

  • Leave it to Better Records to figure out a complicated title with a long history such as this one – originals, reissues, monos, stereos, we had to play them all to find a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory.

Some quick notes:

Bowtie Label Stereo

(more…)

The Mono Pressings of Come Dance With Me Are Just Awful

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Sinatra Available Now

We had two mono pressings, one on the first label, one on the second, and both were unacceptable, especially the reissue.

Side one of the early label pressing was big and tubey but the vocals were gritty. Side two was hot, crude and midrangy.

Which raises the question: what is the general sound of the mono pressing on the early label?

Answer: it has no sound, or more accurately, it has two very different sounds, and if we had ten of them we could probably say it has a lot more sounds than the ones we described. Our advice:Beware of small sample sizes, especially sample sizes of two.

The stereo pressings we listed recently had superb sound. The monos, however, just sounded like old records, and not very good ones at that. The typical record collection is full of them.

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of a pressing such as this one. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

The mono pressings are hopeless on today’s modern stereos, and for that reason we say stick with stereo. For other albums that don’t sound good in mono, click here.

(more…)

Way Back in 2007 We Discovered the Hottest Meddle Stampers of Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

UPDATE 2020

This review from 2007 describes our experience of having stumbled upon the right stampers for Meddle. To this day, only these stampers and no others have won the many shootouts we’ve done for the album in the ensuing years, perhaps as many as a dozen shootouts or more.

These stampers are also very hard to find, which is why you may not have seen a copy of Meddle hit the site in a while. If we could find them, believe me, we would have them up all the time, as this is one amazing sounding album.

To see more albums with one set of stampers that consistently win shootouts, click here.

Want to find your own shootout winner?

Scroll to the bottom to see our advice on doing just that.

This Harvest Green Label British Import pressing has a side one that goes FAR beyond anything we’ve ever heard for this album. We had no choice but to award this side one the very rare A with FOUR pluses. We’ve never given any side of any other Pink Floyd record such a high grade, so you can be sure that you’ve never heard them sound this amazing.

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “how high is up?”

(more…)

Bernie Leaned Out the Vocals on Morrison Hotel, to Ruinous Effect

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Sonic Grade: D (at best)

A few years back we played the 180 gram reissue of Morrison Hotel that came out in 2009. Initially we thought it pretty good, but the longer it played, the more leaned-out and unpleasant it sounded.

Just listen to the vocals — they’re all wrong.

Jim Morrison has one of the richest and most distinctive baritone voices in the history of rock. When he doesn’t sound like the guy I’ve been listening to for more than forty years, something ain’t right.

And what ain’t right — not to put too fine a point on it — is the sound of that record.

Here are a few commentaries you may care to read about Bernie Grundman‘s work as a mastering engineer in the modern era.

We much prefer the work he did back in the old days.

(more…)

Elvis Costello Arrayed His Armed Forces and Produced His Single Best Sounding Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

We consider Armed Forces to be one of the best sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this White Hot Shootout Winner is proof enough to back up our claim. The best copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

The sound of the rhythm section ranks with the best we’ve ever heard. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

The song Oliver’s Army on the first side is a perfect example of what we’re talking about. Rock music doesn’t get much livelier than that.

Skip on down to Green Shirt for another track that’s as punchy as they come.

(more…)

A Very Bad Porky/Pecko Cutting of My Aim Is True

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

My notes for the one and only UK pressing I’ve played in many years, the one with Porky is the dead wax, note its many weaknesses:

Really loud and full.

Too loud and hot vocal.

Strains a lot.

You know what the sound of this record reminds me of?

An old 45 RPM 7″ single. Remember those?

It’s not unusual for 45 RPM singles from back in the day to be very loud, very compressed, and they often have much-too-hot vocals designed to jump right into your lap.

Mono mixes sometimes have some of that same lowest-common-denominator sound.

This mix is stereo but it sounds like it’s coming right out of a jukebox.

No doubt Mr. Peckham was told to make the record sound that way, and he did his job very well.

But audiophiles looking for good sound should heed this warning and avoid the UK LPs of the album. It’s a joke next to the domestic pressings with the right stampers. (The right stampers are hard to find but you will never hear a good sounding early pressing unless you have a copy with the stampers that sound right, a tautology to be sure but one worth noting.)

(more…)