*Thinking About Records

Fandango! Is Yet Another Hoffman/Gray Mediocrity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of ZZ Top Available Now

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play against it?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring.

Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)

Look Around on Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sergio Mendes Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary, about how wrong I was about the Look Around album on Speakers Corner, was written shortly after that pressing came out in the early 2000s.

My foolishness is a textbook case of live and learn. One thing I can tell you for certain is that, although I didn’t know it, I sure had a lot to learn back in those days.

2007 was the year that the penny finally dropped and we finally gained a better understanding of what was going on with the sound of the modern Heavy Vinyl reissue.

Practically everything we would do in audio from that point onward would take us down a very different path than the one we had unknowingly been on. We saw the light, and there was simply never going to be a way to unsee it.

Our Old Review

We were fairly impressed with the Speakers Corner pressing of this album when it came out on Heavy Vinyl in 2001.

Since then we have learned a thing or two. Their version is decent, not bad, but by no stretch of the imagination can it compete with any Hot Stamper pressing found on our site.

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Our 2016 Shootout Winner Just Sounded More Like Live Music

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Back in 2016 we had this to say about a copy of the album we had just played:

This copy will put you front and center for the single greatest Paul McCartney recorded concert of all time.

In the final round of shootouts on both sides, this copy showed itself as clearly superior in terms of transparency and three-dimensionality, as well as having the most rock solid bottom end. To sum it up, my notes read “so real,” which is exactly what makes this copy THE one to have. This is Paul and his mates LIVE in your listening room like you have never heard them before.

This copy gave us the feeling that we were right there in the audience for the taping of this amazing performance. It made other copies sound like records — good records, but records nonetheless. This one has the IMMEDIACY of a live show, one which just happened to be fronted by one of the greatest performers in the history of popular music, Sir Paul McCartney.

We shootout this album about once a year, which means that many changes will have occurred to the stereo in the meantime. One of the qualities that we noticed this time around was how much like live music this album can be when the pressings have one specific quality — tons of bass.

Live music, especially live music heard in a club, tends to have plenty of bass. It’s the sonic quality that’s by far the most difficult to recreate in the home.

When a record manages to capture that kind of “live” low end energy, it really helps make the connection between the sound of live music and the sound coming out of your speakers.

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“A lifelong practice to return to”

New to the Blog? Start Here

Allow me to share a story Ryan Holiday at the Daily Stoic tells that may have some relevance to those of you who are seriously committed to improving the sound quality of the records you play.

Ryan writes:

When Junius Rusticus handed the future emperor of Rome a book, it came with an implication. A true philosopher—a true leader—Rusticus insisted, could not be satisfied just getting the gist of something. They had to understand it inside and out.

None of the lessons that Marcus Aurelius took from Epictetus—the book Rusticus gave him in his mid-twenties—would have been possible without first listening to this lesson. He not only inhaled the book, he clearly went over it over and over until it seeped into his very soul. That’s why Meditations is filled with quotes from it. That’s why Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, managed to stay sane, despite the inherent insanity of his position.

Maybe you’ve read Epictetus. Maybe you’ve been meaning to. But chances are, you haven’t treated it like Marcus did, like Rusticus expected, like Epictetus deserves.

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The Bloated Cello Sound Some Find Appealing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We made a crack about the Starker Mercury recordings below which we gernerally no longer agree with, although I am sure there are some pressings which have bloated sound. Those are the ones that don’t win shootouts.

On this pressing we were a bit surprised at how natural the cello sounded — more like the real instrument and less like the typical recording of it. 

Normally when recording the cello, the microphones are placed fairly close to the instrument. This often results in what’s known as the “proximity effect,” which simply describes a boost in the lower frequencies relative to the more linear response of the microphone when placed at a distance.

The famous Starker cello recordings on Mercury — you know the ones, the originals and even the reissues sell for hundreds and hundreds of dollars — suffer from this effect, which audiophiles seem to prefer. (The Mercury heavy vinyl reissues, at least the ones I’ve played, were ridiculously fat and bloated in the bottom.)

Audiophiles did not seem to mind much, judging by the apparently strong sales and the rave reviews I read. Bass shy systems, and that means most of the systems owned by audiophiles, probably benefited from the bass boost.

Systems with lots of large woofers — at least in our case — would of course make the sound of these pressings positively unbearable. That indeed was our experience.

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Old Tapes, New Tapes, You Know We’ve Heard Our Share

Skeptical Thinking Is Key to Finding Better Sounding Records

I ran into a comment I had made more than twenty years ago about a Hot Stamper jazz reissue from the 70s that, at the time, we thought sounded better than any other version. The original pressing of the record would have come out in the fifties. We wrote:

“The master tapes were about fifteen years old when this record was mastered.  Compare that to a current cutting which would be made from approximately fifty year old tapes.”

Perhaps that explains it.

Or maybe it doesn’t. Whether it explains it or not, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but guesswork.

It has no predictive value.

If, like most people, you enjoy having your biases confirmed, then by all means, whatever reasons work for you are fine by us.

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Time Out Is a Classic Case of Live and Learn

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

When we did a shootout for this album way back in October of 2007, we took the opportunity to play the Classic Records 200 gram pressing. Maybe we got a bad one, who knows, but that record did not sound remotely as good as the real thing. (6 eye or 360, both can be quite good. Skip the Red Label ’70s reissues.)

The piano sounded thin and hard, which was quite unexpected given the fact that we used to consider the Classic LP one of their few winners and actually recommended it. Another example of we was wrong.

As we said in our shootout: “We dropped the needle on the Classic reissue to see how it stacked up against a serious pressing. Suffice it to say, the real Time Out magic isn’t going to be found on any heavy vinyl reissue!”

If I were in charge of the TAS Super Disc List, I would not have put this record on it.

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Answers to Some of Your Hot Stamper Questions

More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions

We discuss a number of subjects with our letter writer below, including what we think of The Beatles’ records in mono, our grading system, how we clean our records and various and sundry other aspects of the business we run. These are the kinds of questions we get regularly and are more than happy to answer.

Hey Tom, 

First off, I got to say, congratulations on a great concept. Also, congrats on having the balls to charge what these albums are worth.

Thanks. You hit the nail right on the head — we charge what the pressings are worth. They are often incredible sounding records of some of the greatest music ever recorded. We should know; we played them, something that no other record dealers on the face of the earth can say. To those of us who do the listening, as well as our Better Records customers, they are priceless.

Like any business, we charge what the market will bear, and it seems people are willing to pay a lot for these records, although less for some than they used to — some of our records now sell for half or even less than what we were getting two or three or five years ago.

That said, the top copies have held their prices pretty well over the years and have often gone up substantially. It’s the second tier and third tier titles and the Super Hots that have tended to fall in price. That’s where the real “bargains” are these days.

Like all of our Hot Stamper pressings, even the cheapest of them (starting at $25!) are guaranteed to be better sounding than any pressing you own or have ever heard, or your money back.

OK – I spent a fortune on my system. Including acoustic design, the best of everything – speakers, turntable, preamp, amps – you get it. The whole set up probably cost me over $600k.

Wow. I don’t have $600k in my system, but I do have about $600k worth of labor in it (!) You can read all about our stereo here.

I am a crazy fanatic – audio perfection is something that really moves me.

Me too. I wrote about it in a commentary that describes how I fell in love with a record that gave me the reason I needed to get deep into audio.

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So Many Columbia Classical LPs Are Bad Sounding – Why Is That?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written in 2005 or thereabouts. Still holds up though.

Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding.

The upper mids are usually nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst possible way.

If Columbia’s goal was to drive the classical music lover with high-fidelity equipment screaming from the room, more often than not they succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they failed.

Some of those pressings we call Hot Stampers, but not many.

Columbia Rock and Jazz

When I play Columbia recordings from the 50s and 60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles and other jazz giants, what strikes me is how natural, warm and sweet the sound is. I was playing an old mono Ellington record recently and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-’50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing. Those guys (the engineers and the musicians) knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how so many of the best sounding recordings in the world managed to be made without any of that stuff.

RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos.

Decca didn’t need it.

Contemporary Records managed to record the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great sounding records get made with such bad equipment?

I guess we’ll never know.

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Jerry Seinfeld – “No one’s really that great.”

Shane Parrish quotes comedian Jerry Seinfeld on what it takes to be great:

“No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage.”

Please forgive me in advance for quoting at length from a commentary I wrote long ago concerning a favorite album of mine and how it serves to illustrate The Pareto Effect.

The album in question has been a key test disc for me. It’s one that helped me dramatically improve the quality of our playback over the last 40-plus years.

The albums on the list linked to above do exactly what good test discs should do.

They can show you what your system is doing wrong, or poorly, and once you’ve fixed it, or made it better, they show you that it actually is better, maybe even right, or at least more right than it was before.

We audiophiles need records like these. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become good at building our audio systems. Because the amount of experimenting you do with your setup, components, room, electricity and the like is the only thing that can take you to the highest levels of audio.

The reality we audiophiles must face in our journey to higher quality sound is that buying good equipment, regardless of price or quality, will not get us there.

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