Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now
UPDATE 2026
Reviewed in 2010 so take what we say with a large grain of salt. Dutch pressings are rarely the way to go.
This Dutch Import is the best sounding copy I have ever heard. It is dead silent and rich!
Big spacious hall sound. Lovely mid-hall perspective. Very smooth and sweet.
You can listen to music like this for hours and never get tired — the opposite of your typical Classic Records pressing.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2026
Here is our 2012 review for this amazing sounding breakthrough pressing of Tarkio.
It’s records like these that are the payoff for all the money, time and effort you’ve put into your system.
This White Hot Stamper side one of our beloved Tarkio, Brewer and Shipley’s Folk Rock Masterpiece, is without a doubt the BEST SOUND we have ever heard on any pressing bar none. This side sets a standard that no other copy on any side could touch. True, we awarded a Triple Plus grade to an amazing side two copy, but this side one is still the better of the two. We could easily have called it Four Pluses but chose to go with the simpler A+++ and this explanation.
However you frame it, this side is OFF THE CHARTS in a big way. It’s amazingly rich, yet clear and transparent as any we played — what a combination!
This, like Dark Side and so many other White Hot Stamper records we offer to the discriminating audiophile, is ANALOG at its finest. To our knowledge there hasn’t been a single record mastered in the last thirty years with this kind of sound, and we know whereof we speak: we’ve played them by the hundreds.
A Desert Island Disc for me with wonderfully NATURAL sound. This copy had the ULTIMATE Side One (A+++) and a very competitive Side Two (A++), making it the King of our Shootout. If you love this record as much as you should, this is the copy to own. I would love to keep it for my desert island, but we know there is surely a deserving soul out there who will treasure it as much as I do, and probably play it a lot more often, so if you know the album at all this is your chance at greatness. (And I still haven’t found a desert island I’m all that partial to anyway.)
Not Really One Toke Over the Line
Please don’t assume that this album has much in the way of uptempo country rockers like One Toke Over the Line, Flying Burrito Brothers style. Nothing could be further from the truth. Practically every other song on the album is better, almost all of them are taken at a slower pace, with none of them having the “poppy” arrangement of that carefully calculated Top Forty hit. The rest of the music on the album, the music you probably don’t know, is much better than the music that you do know if what you know is that song.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Recordings Available Now
The domestic pressings of Before And After Science are typically grainy, low-rez and hard sounding. But that doesn’t mean our best Hot Stamper pressings are imports.
No. The best pressings are made right here in the good old U.S. of A.
Say what? Yes, it’s true. We were SHOCKED to find such Hot Stamper sound lurking in the grooves of a domestic Eno LP. It’s the only one of its kind. In thirty plus years of record playing I can’t think of any domestic Eno LP that ever sounded this good.
Now hold on just a minute. The British pressings of Eno’s albums are always the best, aren’t they?
For the first three albums, absolutely. But rules were made to be broken. This pressing has the knockout sound we associate with the best British originals of Eno’s albums, not the flat, cardboardy qualities of the typical domestic reissue.
The UK pressings we have played have always been awful. We put one in a shootout in 2025 and it was as awful as we remember it. Our notes read:
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now
We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:
Analog at its Tubey Magical finest. You’ll never play a CD (or other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long you live. This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.
But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.
One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.
The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.
Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*
Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
Especially considering the fact that the best copy (3/3) with those stampers earned significantly better grades than the worst copy with those stampers (1.5/1.5)*.
Does anyone have a practical way to get around the confusing and exasperating reality that one set of stampers can sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers can sound not much better than passable? Take a spin and see where the wheel of fortune stops.
To be honest, we can’t say there is a practical way to get around these mysteries, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining the impractical one we came up with twenty years ago and, according to our customers, it works like gangbusters.
Turns out that all you have to do is just play lots and lots of different copies of albums and they will tell you how they sound.
In the case of the record you see below, the copies with the best stampers and the copies with some of the worst stampers had the same stampers.
Here is the full stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.
Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did this particular shootout for.
We are not revealing what mystery title had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somewhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Wonder Available Now
UPDATE 2026
We discovered a killer Shootout Winning pressing in 2008 that showed us an Innervisions we had no idea could possibly exist. It was so good sounding we gave it 4 Pluses, something we no longer do.
Our Commentary from 2008
A++++ Beyond White Hot Stampers discovered for Innervisions.
After struggling through multiple stalled shootouts, we’ve finally unearthed copies of this wonderful album that have the sound we’ve been waiting for. We’ve gone through SCORES of pressings in the hope that one day we’d find a copy like this — with two Demo Quality sides, and fairly quiet vinyl, it’s our first ever White Hot Stamper for Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now
A classic example of live and learn. In 2008 we had simply not done our homework properly.
Keep in mind that I had been an audiophile for at least 33 years by that date, and a professional audiophile record dealer for 21. Had a pretty nice rig back then too. However, in all those years, I and my staff had never been able to crack the code for Zep III.
Sure, by 2008 we had auditioned plenty of the pressings that we thought were the most likely to sound good: the original and later domestic pressings, the early and later British LPs, some early and later German pressings, maybe a Japanese import or two. In other words, the usual suspects.
We already knew how bad sounding the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl was; no need to put that in a shootout. It earned an “F” right out of the gate for its bright and harsh sound.
The result? We were roughly in the same position as most serious record collecting audiophiles, if not actually in a better one: who do you know that has played at least ten different pressings of Led Zeppelin III, or any other album for that matter?
We had auditioned a number pressings of the album and thought we knew enough about the sound to pick a winner. We thought the best original British Plum and Orange label pressings had the goods that no other copies could or would have. (Years later we would get hold of another one, clean it up and put it in a shootout.)
But of course, like most audiophiles who judge records with an insufficiently large sample size, we turned out to be mistaken.
Logic simply hadn’t worked.
None of the originals would end up winning another shootout once we’d discovered the right reissues.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now
UPDATED 2026
We have not had very good luck with domestic pressings of this album for quite a few years now. The German pressings are also not very good, earning at most 1.5+ and more often than not a lower grade. (Hey, we had to be sure.)
The Canadian audiophile pressings are comparable, 1.5+ or close to it, not good enough to bother with when the right UK pressings are so much better.
The listing below is from 2012. Since that time we have been able to find and play a great many British pressings of the album, and they always win our shootouts now.
But the domestic pressings can also do very well, just not well enough to win shootouts these days, a clear case of live and learn.
Our Understanding from 2012
TWO AMAZING SIDES, including an A+++ SIDE ONE! It’s not the A&M Half Speed, and it’s not a British pressing either. It’s domestic folks, your standard plain-as-day A&M pressing, and we’re as shocked as you are. Hearing this copy (as well as an amazing Brit; they can be every bit as good, in their own way of course) was a THRILL, a thrill that’s a step up in “thrillingness” over our previous favorite pressing, the A&M Half Speed. [!]
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now
A classic case of live and learn.
What follows is the commentary for the Canadian One Sided Half-Speed that we had auditioned around 2000. It came in a regular jacket, not the one you see pictured, and was part of a big overstock batch I had gotten my hands on a number of years before.
Getting It Exactly Backwards
Half of this record is Half-Speed Mastered! There’s an interesting story behind this album. Those of you who’ve been collecting audiophile records for a long time may remember that Who’s Next was released as an MCA Masterphile Half-Speed Mastered pressing produced in Canada. I remember liking it back in the day, which had to be 15 years ago at least. But they are very rare and I haven’t played one in many years.
I ran into some sealed Canadian pressings of Who’s Next, and when I cracked one open to play it I noted it had Masterphile written in the deadwax on one side. Apparently they had made so few Masterphile pressings that the metal work was still useable and they decided to press some “regular” records with one of the stampers.
And I remember I used to tell people that the good side, side one, was the Masterphile side. Then three or four years ago [circa 2000], I had occasion to play the record. Lo and behold, side one was bright and phony, and side two was rich and sweet, like the good Track Label pressings! I had gotten it exactly backwards.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Pop and Jazz Vocals Available Now
UPDATE 2025
Turns out the Black Label early pressings actually are the best sounding. In 2025 we discovered we were wrong when we said we were wrong back in 2015.
And as far as we can tell, unlike anyone reviewing records for audiophiles writing (or speaking) these days, we have no problem admitting to it. Admitting to our mistakes is significant for many reasons, but the two that immediately come to mind are these:
We write about how regular shootouts are and always will be the best way to improve the sound quality of your collection.
What we don’t say much about is how any music-loving audiophile could ever find the time to do this work. Where would the time come from to do multiple shootouts over many years, or the time to find the records, or the money it takes to buy them these days, when ever record ever pressed seems to command a collector price.
God knows we’re no angels in this regard. We do it for the simple reason that it’s our job to do shootouts year in and year out for the same records again and again. There will never be a time when everyone who wants a better sounding Abbey Road already has a good-enough sounding Abbey Road. The best copies are never short of buyers. The prices may change but the demand only goes in one direction: up.
We are not in the position of having a choice and choosing to do the right thing.
Applying the lesson of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, we are set up to do what needs to be done in order to run a business devoted to pleasing our customers. Millions of other business owners could say exactly the same. If for some reason their businesses aren’t set up properly, or run properly, or don’t offer goods at a price their customers are willing to pay, as day folllows night they will surely not be in business for long.