Lower Sound Quality Pressings

Biggles Let Us Down on this Pressing of Who Are You

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

We described a recent shootout winning pressing this way:

This copy has the Glyn Johns big, bold sound we demand from this famous producer/engineer.

Forget the domestic pressings, forget the DD Labs Half-Speed, forget whatever lame reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper British pressing is the only way to go.

The title song sounds amazing on this killer Triple Plus side two – the dynamic power of the recording comes through loud and clear.

Of course, not all stampers are hot enough to win a shootout. This British A3/B2 cut by none other than Biggles was judged to have middling sound quality.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good sounding a recording Who Are You can be on the best pressings.

(more…)

Avoid these Stampers on Buffalo Springfield’s Retrospective Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

In 2025 we finally got around to doing another shootout for Buffalo Springfield’s wonderful Retrospective album, a “greatest hits” compilation for a band that really only had one hit but put out two of my all time favorite albums, Buffalo Springfield Again and Last Time Around. Our Shootout Winning early pressing was described this way:

Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the best pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment. “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments

And the three Psych tracks – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – are guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard them.

But if you somehow ended up with a copy that has the wrong stampers, stampers similar to the ones you see below — on the original label mind you — none of those songs will have the audiophile qualities we describe.

And if you thought you were buying an original pressing of the album on the Yellow Atco label, well, that’s exactly what you were buying.

It’s not really your fault. The good pressings and the bad pressings all look the same. How were you to know your random purchase would only hint at the sound quality of the best pressings?

(more…)

Skip the OJC on You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce OJC-159

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

This album is findable on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the ones we played well off the mark.

They were brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.  Above all they badly lacked Tubey Magic, a sound the best pressings are swimming in.

Consequently, none of them made the cut for our shootout.

Here are more than 400 other vintage albums that fell short, whether sonically or musically. Audiophiles should seriously consider avoiding them, and if any of you own copies of these titles, pull them off the shelf and see if the sound and/or music is as bad as we say.

Bright, thin and lacking in Tubey Magic is just not our sound.  It’s not the sound Roy DuNann was famous for, so why should we like it either?

(more…)

It Only Took Us Six Years to Find Another Killer Copy of Down In L.A.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

Our comments about our Hot Stamper winner from 2019 appear below.

Note that we could not even find White Hot sound on either side, and side two, at 1+, does not even qualify as a Hot Stamper these days, which means it would never be offered for sale on the site.

This was a tough shootout!

We had a lot more research and development to do, and six years later we had the killer copy to prove that it could be done. In 2025, we found a pressing that made it all worthwhile.

This is one of the BEST copies we’ve played in many years, close to five I would guess. Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Hippie Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre. It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars. The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul. (more…)

Living Strings / Morton Gould and his Orchestra

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I typed so badly back in the early 2000s that it was actually easier to just dictate the short reviews we put up for our records. Rereading this just now made me recall that fact, because it is either poorly written or dictated, and I am going to go with the latter since I hate to think I ever wrote this badly.

As a rule, Moton Gould’s recordings for RCA are not especially good. If you see this title for cheap, pick it up. Otherwise I would give it a pass.

RCA Shaded Dog LP with good sound.

(more…)

How Good Are the Domestic Pressings of Days of Future Passed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and the good early imports, you know that the imports just murder the American LPs.

Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, so they tend to sound dubby and smeary, yet strangely they’re also thinner and more transistory than the UK imports, and overall have a fraction of the Tubey Magic that make the good imports such an engaging listening experience.

Moody Blues albums on import are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for these problems. But the properly mastered copies are none of these things.

The cutting engineers who cut the pressings for the U.S. market thought they knew exactly how to fix the problem. When the album came out in America in 1968, leaner and cleaner were in and rich and tubey were out.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super-clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for.

It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the recording with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes. In our experience only the best UK pressings can give you the sound.

(more…)

Straight Up Trash from Ron Furmanek on 2 LPs

More of the Music of Badfinger

This British 2 LP reissue from 1993 was (badly) digitally remastered by a Mr. Ron Furmanek. May his name live in infamy.

It contains alternate mixes of 6 songs at 45 RPM on the second record, with sound every bit as bad as the sound of the first record.

The whole Apple series of remastered releases — at least the ones we played — was awful sounding and should be avoided completely. These records are nothing but audiophile bullshit.

If you are a record collector and must have those alternate mixes, just buy the CD. The vinyl is terrible, the CD probably sounds every bit as bad, but at least the CD is cheap and plays all the songs straight through.

If you own this record, my guess is it is pristine.

If you played it at all, you played it once and put it away on a shelf where it probably sits to this very day. Good records get played and bad records get shelved. If you have lots of pristine records filed away, ask yourself: Why aren’t you playing them?

(more…)

This Tony Hawkins-Mastered Pressing Sure Was a Letdown

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

This London original pressing with 1K/1K stampers (the work of Tony Hawkins) was so bright, dry, and shrill I could hardly stand it for more than the minute it took me to realize it was not going to get any better. The sound is bad enough to send it right into our hall of shame.

There are a number of other Deccas and Londons that we’ve played over the years that were disappointing, and they can be found here.

The copy we had back in 2010 was a very good sounding record, or so we thought.

Maybe we were wrong! It’s not as though we don’t admit to the possibility. You can read all about it below.

(more…)

Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs – Tubey Magical on the Red Label?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Tubey Magical Rock Records in Stock Now 

UPDATE 2023

In 2023 we did another shootout for this devilishly difficult-to-find album, and none of the Red Label pressings we played scored better than 1.5+ on any side. Many of them were hopeless thin and dry.

We would not recommend Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs at anything but a nominal price.

Our older commentary follows.

Years ago we noted that the red label Columbia reissues of most of their catalog leave much to be desired. Here is an excerpt from a listing for The Byrds’ Greatest Hits.

One might assume that the later label copies would be the ones that would most likely have been cut with lower distortion equipment, the way the later Kind of Blues are cut so much cleaner than the earlier ones.

On The Byrds’ albums this is almost never the right approach. The Tubey Magic of the earlier pressings is absolutely crucial to the sound of these albums. It is the sine qua non of Classic 60’s Rock sound. Without it you might as well be playing a CD.

It turns out that some copies of Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs on the later red label can actually sound amazingly Tubey Magical, especially on side two. In fact we heard a red label side two that was even more rich than the best 360s.

Since the person listening to the record has no idea what the actual label is of the record being evaluated — which is about as close an approximation of the Scientific Method as we can manage around here — it was very surprising to hear such glorious Tubey Magical Richness and Sweetness come from such an unexpected source.

A good reason not to avoid later pressings and reissues absent any evidence of their inferiority.

And a good reason to judge your records by playing them whenever possible. (more…)

The 2002 OJC Pressings Can Be Very Good but They Don’t Win Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

For a Hot Stamper pressing we put up recently, we noted:

Moon Beams is one of the best sounding Bill Evans records we’ve ever played. You can see why we chose it to be the first OJC Hot Stamper of his work to hit the site back in 2015. Play “It Might As Well Be Spring” for the kind of sublime musical experience you only find on 20th century analog recordings.

All of that is true for the best of the 20th century pressings we played. (Which, by the way, does not include any originals as those are consistently inferior to the later pressings we’ve auditioned.)

As for the 21st century, the sound of the best 2002 pressings on OJC are somewhat opaque and dry compared to the best that came before. This is something we rarely point out in the listings we have on sale on the site. You generally have to come to the blog to get a fuller picture of the specific shortcomings we might have of some of our Hot Stamper pressings.

We know both dry sound and opaque sound well, having played hundreds of pressings that suffer from such conditions.

The sound may be decent on most of these 2002 pressings, and fairly good on the best of them, but that’s not really what we were hoping to find. We spent a lot of money and we spent a lot of time, to quote a famous line by a famous rock band, but the six 2002 pressings we cleaned and played nevertheless came up a bit short. That’s just how it goes sometimes. (And sometimes it goes completely off the tracks.)

The way we approach a shootout such as this typically involves playing a copy or two some pressing, the 2002 OJC in this case, and hearing sound good enough to make us think it might have the potential for greatness. As you can see by the marks we gave out, the average copy earned a grade of 1.5+, which is a good, not great Hot Stamper grade.  Greatness was just not in the cards.