Good, Not Great Sound

These are records that we auditioned and found to have good, not great, sound quality. If a record earns a Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+ on both sides, it is a very good sounding record, but it is a far cry from the best pressings that we’ve played in shootouts.

Art Pepper / Meets The Rhythm Section – OJC style

More of the Music of Art Pepper

  • A vintage Contemporary recording pressed on OJC vinyl, here with very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last
  • True, this reissue earned a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, but we still guarantee that it will beat the pants off any Heavy Vinyl reissue, because every one of those that we played was opaque, muddy and thick enough to have us crying “uncle” after five minutes
  • Many consider this to be the best record Art Pepper ever made, along with Art Pepper + Eleven, and I agree completely
  • If you are looking for a shootout winning copy, let us know – with music and sound like this, we hope to be able to do this shootout again soon
  • 5 stars: “… this recording convinced [Pepper] that emotion was the paramount impulse of jazz performance… a diamond of recorded jazz history.”
  • This is a Must Own jazz album from 1957 that belongs in every jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

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You Can Do a Lot Better than this Tchaikovsky 5th

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Pressings Available Now

We played a few copies of the album we had sitting in the backroom and none of them quite worked for us.  The sound was somewhat veiled and dry. (The 1s/1s pressing was the worst of the bunch, by the way.)

A decent record, not much more than that, and not really not worth putting in a shootout with the better pressings of the work we have discovered over the years. The best of the bunch might earn a grade of 1.5+, so why even bother?

Yes, we still have no Hot Stamper pressings of the work to offer, but we know they are coming, someday. Our current favorite is a performance by Mravinsky on DG from 1961.

It’s a “good, not great” vintage classical record, best played on an old school stereo system that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, like the one we employed to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to spot its many faults.

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These Stampers Consistently Come in Last in Our Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

All the original domestic pressings are cut by Ted Jensen at Sterling as far as we know.

You can find TJ and STERLING on every last one of them (with the notable exception of the SRC pressings, best avoided). What you can’t find is good sound on every last one of them.

The most common stampers can be found from pressing plants using the following label designations: MON, PRC, PRCW, AR and SP.

In our experience, two of the five labels listed above have the potential to win shootouts. Two of the others tend to end up somewhere in the middle of the grading curve. One consistently ends up at the bottom.

It’s important to keep in mind that in our shootouts, the person hearing the copy being played, the one who is carefully noting its strengths and weaknesses, has no idea what pressing plant actually produced the record, or what its specific stampers numbers might be.

That kind of  information is compiled after the grading has been done. That’s when these patterns emerge.

The domestic pressings with the stampers shown above have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of The Long Run than you have ever heard. It won’t be cheap, but we guarantee that it will be very, very good.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and less than stellar sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

Stampers

That the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers, the simpler the better. Easier to memorize that way.

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How Can the Best Stampers Also Be the Worst Stampers?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Available Now

Recently we conducted a shootout for a superb Contemporary recording, one that we had auditioned a couple of times before and one which we felt we knew the music and the quality of the sound well.

It’s not the record you see pictured.

For now we’re keeping the title a mystery, consistent with the idea that we give out lots of bad stampers on this blog, but almost never do we give out the good ones.

Why, you ask?

The cost of discovering the right stampers is usually high, can take decades, and is fundamentally at the heart of how we make our money: by finding amazing sounding pressings with stampers we know to be good, cleaning them up, playing them, and offering those that, for whatever mysterious reasons that no one has figured out, including us, tend to have the best sounding grooves.

This time around we kept track of the stamper numbers for all the pressings we played, something we are making a habit of doing these days and using to highlight discoveries in the sound of the records we play.

In this case, we discovered an anomaly we thought we would bring to the audiophile world’s attention: the fact that the stampers for the best souding pressing were also the stampers for the worst sounding pressing, because they were the stampers for all the pressings.

One copy earned our White Hot Stamper grade, our highest, for its clearly superior sound, and another one earned our lowest Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+. The rest were quite good, in between those two, which is a very common outcome for most of our shootouts: lots of records in the middle of the distribution, some winners at the top and some losers at the bottom.

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Even in the Quietest Moments – P & M Stampers Let Us Down This Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

After discovering killer Hot Stampers for this forgotten classic, we feel the album can hold its own with any of Supertramp’s 70s releases, from Crime of the Century all the way through to Breakfast in America.

The UK-pressed White Hot Stamper pressings from our recent shootouts showed us some of the best Supertramp sound we have ever heard on any of their albums, which is saying a lot. Supertramp is one of the most well-recorded bands in the history of pop music. Geoff Emerick took over most of the recording duties after the band decided to work with a different engineer for this, their 1977 album.

KEN SCOTT recorded the two albums that came before this one, Crime and Crisis, and as has been well documented on this very site, he knocked both of them out of the park.

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Watch Out for the 5c Stamper on Side One of The White Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

Starting as early as 1984, some pressings of The White Album came with a decidely inferior side one, 5c.

Often it was mated to an equally problematic-sounding side two, -6. Although the -6 stamper can be good, when it has 5c on side one, it’s never as good as it should be.

Even though this copy had less-than-impressive sound on sides three and four — these sides qualify as minimally Hot Stamper pressings — there is nothing inherently wrong with the -2/-3 stamper numbers for those sides.

These later pressings just don’t sound as good as the earlier ones we like.

Not that we like the originals.

The few we’ve played were terrible. They tend to have -1 or -2 stampers for the first two sides, and their mastering tends to add a lot of problems to a recording that already has more than its share.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice regarding the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. The White Album sounds its best:

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Avoid M Stampers and Imports If You Want the Best Sound on Tapestry

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Carole King Available Now

The domestic pressings with the stampers shown below, and others similar to them, have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of Tapestry than you have ever heard. It won’t be cheap, but we can guarantee that it will be very, very good.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, a subject we discuss below, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and decidedly mediocre sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

Note that the last listing is for an early UK import. I have no idea how that record got into the shootout. The chances of an import doing well up against Bernie Grundman’s brilliant mastering — from back in the good old days of the 60s, 70s and 80s when he was actually doing brilliant mastering work — is so close to zero it can’t be calculated.

Sometimes we take long shots, hoping to learn something new. In this case, we learned what we already know. Yes, there are still some audiophiles who buy imports of a record like this hoping to find better sound. I can’t imagine what kind of system it would take to hide the bright, dubby sound of the UK pressing we played, but judging from some of the foolishness I read on the Hoffman forum and others of its ilk, I know there must be plenty of them out there.

Monarch is responsible for the mediocre-at-best sound of the pressings with the stampers you see above. We tend to like Monarch pressings as a rule, but sometimes they mess up, and they messed up Tapestry compared to others who pressed the record.

We liked all the other copies with other stampers better than than these, which just goes to show you can never know how good it can get until it gets that good. That is what shootouts allow us to do.

Playing close to twenty copies of Tapestry in a shootout allows us to grade Tapestry on a scale, with the M stampers filling out most of the bottom and the other stampers — wouldn’t you like to know which ones! — occupying the middle and the top of the distribution. 

This is what the forum posters fail to understand. They think they have a Hot Stamper when what they actually have (maybe!) is a good sounding record. They don’t know how amazing the record can sound — so much more amazing than the one they own, probably — so they assume they have something good, maybe even the best.

They probably do not, but who really knows? The shootout would supply the data they need to support their conclusions, and since they could not be bothered to conduct one, they have no data to back up their opinions.

The “probably” you see in the above two sentences is there for a good reason. We make a point of being clear about what we can know and we cannot know, and we cannot know what a record sounds like until we play it.

This is obviously true for those of us who try to listen as critically as possible, but we also know that it is just as important to think about records the right way.

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Our Old Prediction for LSC 2563 Came True

Hot Stamper Pressings that Feature the Violin

Many years ago we wrote:

This is a very old review and it’s doubtful we would not prefer the right Shaded Dog pressing these days.

That turned out to be the case, as we had two late-label 70s Red Seal pressings in the shootout we just did and only one of them was even passable.

A few things about the new pressings and the old commentary caught my eye.

First off, 3s is a fairly low number. The Shaded Dogs that win the shootout must be lower, which means they are either 1s or 2s. Not much to choose from there!

Secondly, the commentary you see below goes into great detail regarding what each piece found on the pressing was doing right and wrong.

It makes us sound like we knew what we were talking about when it came to this specific Red Seal pressing of the album we had played.

I assure you that we did not.

On the web I come across lots of reviews for audiophile pressings in which the writers go on for page after page about how much better the new Heavy Vinyl pressing is compared to the old record the reviewer owns.

This is no longer hard for me to understand. They are simply as lost as I used to be.

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These Are Just Some of the Stampers to Avoid on Catch Bull at Four

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

The domestic pressings of Catch Bull at Four with the stampers shown below, and others similar to them, have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of Catch Bull at Four than you have ever heard.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, a subject we discuss below, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and decidedly mediocre sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing very little of this information on the site, for a number of good reasons we discuss here.

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers.

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The Classic Pressing of Beethoven’s 4th Can Have Very Good Sound

More of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven

Somehow we managed to have a Classic Records pressing on hand to play in our most recent shootout for the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.

We knew all the way back in 1997 that Classic had done a good job with the record — we recommended it as one of the best Classic Records pressings in our catalogs at the time — but we sure didn’t expect it to do as well as it did, earning 2 pluses on one side and close to that on the other.

Years ago we wrote:

Here is the kind of sound that Classic Records could not ignore, even though the original was only ever made available as part of RCA’s budget reissue series, Victrola.

Don’t let its budget status fool you — this pressing puts to shame most of what came out on the full price Living Stereo label. (And handily beats any Classic Records reissue ever made.)

The top and bottom are wrong to varying degrees on both sides of the Classic, as you can see from our notes, which read:

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