Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now
Below you will find some of the more popular commentaries we’ve written about the album.
For all you record collectors out there, please note that no pressing from 1969 has ever won a shootout. If you have a nice early UK Apple LP, we would love to sell you one that sounds better than yours, if you can spare the kind of bread we charge for the privilege of owning a masterpiece of music and sound such as this.
More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain
Most pressings of this album tend to err in one of two ways: either they’re a little bright and get hard and gritty in the upper mids, or they’re wrong in the opposite direction, with sound that is smeary and dull.
Our best copies get the balance right — plenty of texture on the keyboards and drums, with vocals that still have presence and breathiness — and not too much grit.
An all-keyboard pop record like this was a rarity at the time. The only other instruments besides drums (and one track with guitar) are keyboards. Every song is layered with multi-tracked clavinets, organs, and Moogs — it was a remarkable feat in 1975 to create an album with nothing but keys.
Listen to the title track, the most dynamic song on the record, and you will hear just how well all of those stacked keyboards and synths work together. (Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life borrowed a page or two from Gary’s solo debut here.)
Many copies suffer from harsh, digital-sounding highs.
Pull out your old copy and listen to the beginning of side two and you should have no trouble hearing what we’re on about.
Compare that to the silkier, sweeter top end on even the lowest-graded Hot Stamper pressing you may have picked up from your friends at Better Records and it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself going back to listening to whatever pressing you had been playing.
The comparison, we hope, will be edifying.
Want to find your own top quality copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
In our experience, this record sounds best this way:
And that means that it’s Robert Ludwig’s initials you should be looking for in the dead wax. Accept no substitutes.
Percussion Recordings with Hot Stampers Available Now
Music for Bang Baaroom and Harp is yet another one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some copies. This happened many years ago, and as you can see from the commentary we wrote back then, it came as quite a shock to us at the time.
Are audiophile reviewers or audiophiles in general listening critically to records like this?
I wonder; I could not find word one about any polarity issues with this title, and yet we’ve played four or five copies with reversed polarity on side two. How come nobody is hearing it, apart from us?
We leave you, dear reader, to answer that question for yourself.
This listing has the latest information on the stamper numbers to avoid.
More stamper and pressing information can be found here.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now
Musically this is one of Taylor’s best. Every track is good and many are wonderful. (More on that here.)
There are five or six James Taylor records that are Desert Island Discs for me. I know they probably wouldn’t let me take six of the same artists’ records to my island, but I would hope they would make an exception for James Taylor’s LPs, because they really do set a standard that few other popular performers can meet.
JT is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:
Hot Stamper Pressings of Rubber Soul Available Now
Rubber Soul is one of the most difficult Beatles records to get to sound right. The individual tracks seem to vary drastically in terms of their tonality. Some (What Goes On) sound sweet, rich and near perfect. Others (You Won’t See Me) can be thin and midrangy. What’s a mother to do?
I think what we’re dealing with here are completely different approaches to the final mix. The Beatles were experimenting with different kinds of sounds, and their experiments produced very different results from track to track on this album more than practically any other I can think of besides The White Album (which was recorded in multiple studios by multiple producers and engineers).
Is Your Rig Up To It?
One final note: this is the kind of record that really rewards a good cartridge/ arm/ table combination. You do not want to play this record with a lean or bright sounding cartridge, or a front end that does not track sibilances well. (I could name some equipment that I would not want to play this record on, but rather than insult the owners of such equipment, let’s just say they will have a tough time with this record.)
The Toughest Test on Side One
“Nowhere Man.” Unless you have an especially good copy this song will sound VERY compressed, much too thick and congealed to be as enjoyable as we know it can be. The best copies manage to find the richness in the sound as well as the breathiness in the vocals that others barely hint at.
Play this track on whatever copies you own (more than one I hope) and see if it doesn’t sound as compressed, thick and congested as we describe.
The Toughest Test on Side Two
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rod Stewart Available Now
I Know I’m Losing You rocks as hard as any song from the period, with Demo Disc sound.
If you have a system with big dynamic speakers and can drive them to seriously loud listening levels, you will be blown away by the power of this recording.
You know what album this one has the most in common with? Nirvana’s Nevermind.
Every Pictures Tells a Story is the Nevermind of its day, twenty years earlier.
It has that kind of power in the bass and drums. Off the charts energy too.
But it also has beautifully realized acoustic guitars and mandolins, something that virtually no recording for the last twenty years can claim. In that sense it towers over Nevermind, an album I hold in very high esteem.
If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers, live-in-the-studio sound, this is the album for you.
The opening track on side one has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded. The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically.
Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. Got big dynamic speakers? A concrete foundation under your listening room? You are going to have a great time playing this one for your audiophile friends who have screens or little box speakers. Once they hear what big well-recorded drums can sound like on speakers designed to move air, they may want to rethink their choices.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now
This commentary may be roughly twenty years old, but we think it holds up just fine.
At one time this was my single favorite Demo Disc.
A customer who bought one of these once told me it was the best sounding record he had ever heard in his life. I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s certainly as good as any rock record I have ever heard, and I’ve heard an awful lot of very good ones.
There’s an interesting story behind this album, which I won’t belabor here. One listen to a later reissue or Heavy Vinyl pressing or Greatest Hits and you’ll know I speak the truth when I say that the tape used to cut this pressing was never used again to cut another.
It is GONE. LOST FOREVER. Most copies of this album are mediocre at best, and positively painful to listen to once you’ve heard the right pressing, the one cut from the real tape.
Which mostly explains why I never had any respect for this first album. The average copy sounds so bad that the musical values just aren’t communicated to the listener. Isn’t this why we have all this fancy equipment in the first place, to allow the musicians to communicate with us the way they intended? And when the record is a poor reproduction of the artist’s work, it prevents this communication from taking place. (And don’t get me started about CDs.)
Accidental Discoveries
Those poor reproductions are probably the ones you have, if you even have a copy of the album at all. I’ve been buying Eagles records for more than 30 40 years and I only discovered my first hot stamper pressing around 2001. Of course I found it entirely by accident, with no inkling beforehand that the album could possibly sound remotely as good as that amazing copy was sounding all those years ago. I played Train Leaves Here This Morning for anyone who wanted to hear the system at its best (back when I had the monstrous Whisper system in my living room).
Before that I had heard a number of flat sounding versions and concluded, as most audiophiles would, that the album must be poorly recorded. I stopped thinking like that soon after, which is one of the main reasons you can find amazing sounding pressings of albums on our site that aren’t supposed to sound any good. (Do a quick Google search and see if any audiophile has anything good to say about the album. We came up empty-handed.)
If you own one of those bad later pressings, it’s a record you might have played once or twice, gotten little out of, and put it back on the shelf, wondering why those stupid Eagles couldn’t get their act together and record their music better.
But they did! They were recorded brilliantly. Glyn Johns, the recording engineer, is a genius. The sound is smooth, rich, sweet and Tubey Magical beyond belief.
I would say it’s as good a pop/rock recording as any I have ever heard, and better than 99.99% of the competition.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now
In 2024, Dylan’s landmark 1965 release returned to the site after a hiatus of almost two years.
In the same way Sgt. Pepper changed popular music less than two years later, Highway 61 Revisited left all of Dylan’s contemporaries behind, scrambling to keep up with the standard he set.
Our 3/3 copy was a knockout. It sold for an enormous amount of money directly to one of our best customers, never making it to the site, and was worth every penny in our estimation, and surely in the estimation of the fellow who now has it in his collection.
Dylan’s records are almost never awarded notes like these. It was an amazing find, the kind of record we live for here at Better Records. I hope you can read our writing.
Highway 61 Boilerplate
When looking for a top copy, in our shootouts we are paying special attention to the qualities listed below. We noted:
Here are some of the things we specifically listen for in an electric folk rock record from the sixties, even one as uniquely groundbreaking as Highway 61 Revisited.
This Hot Stamper copy is simply doing more of these things better than other copies we played in our shootout. The best copies have:
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young
If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this copy will let you do it. It’s not easy to find good sound on even one side of this album, let alone all four.
Three Shootout Winning White Hot Stamper sides out of four! These three sides handily blow other copies out of the water, with the size, space, presence and energy that only the finest pressings are capable of. If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this is the only copy that will let you do it. No other copy we’ve ever played rocked the way this one rocked! For three quarters of the “concert”, YOU ARE THERE.
If the singers get hard and shrill in the louder passages, then what you have is a pretty typical pressing. Add grit and grain, smeared transients, opacity, surface noise and a lack of weight down low and you’ll know why it takes us years to find enough copies to shoot out — because this is what most pressings sound like.
As you have surely read on the site by now, this band has put out more bad pressings of good recordings than practically any I can think of. Here is an excerpt from our review of their first album that discusses the issue in more depth.
Wrong Sound
95% of all the pressings of this album I’ve ever played have been disappointing. They’re almost always wrong, each in their own way of course. Some are dull, some are shrill, some are aggressive, some have no bass — every mastering fault you can imagine can be heard on one copy or another of this record. The bottom line? If you want to buy them and try them from your local record store, plan on spending hundreds of dollars and putting in years of frustrating effort, perhaps with little to show for it in the end. This is one tough nut to crack; it’s best to know that going in.
Sound So Real
The song “Triad”, for example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and acoustic guitar. It’s as real sounding as anything I’ve ever heard from this band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded significantly relative to what the original microphones picked up.
This live album gives you the “naked” sound of the real thing — the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that would never happen again. (Later CSN albums are mostly dreadful. Fortunately later Neil Young albums, e.g., Zuma, are often Demo Discs of the highest quality.)
More records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific shootout copy.
Side One
Big, clear, present, dynamic — what’s not to like? It shows you what few copies can: how well-recorded the album is. Halverson did a great job but you have to work your tail off to find a copy that does his brilliant engineering justice. Sad, isn’t it?
