Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now
One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix is just plain awful.
Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.
It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.
Is it the worst version of the album ever pressed? It almost has to be, doesn’t it?
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now
Because the conventional wisdom turned out to be so wrong.
Our intuition that the British originals of Heroes would sound the best was incorrect.
The experiments we carried out falsified that prediction.
In our world, intuitions have a bad track record, but more than a few audiophiles — many of whom are addicted to sharing their “record knowledge” on audiophile forums and youtube channels — seem unaware of the shortcomings of this approach.
Taking a page from one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, we’ve opted to use a more scientific approach in order to discover the record pressings that have by far the best soundi, and we encourage you to do likewise.
We pioneered the evidence-based approach to finding the best sounding pressings, and, like all good scientists, we shared it with everyone. Some in the audiophile community have taken it to heart, but most have chosen to put their faith in reviewers, forum posters, common sense and logic.
None of these produce consistently good results, but those who use these methods are loathe to question them and only rarely if ever learn the error of their ways.
Once a decision has been made and a specific pressing acquired — you could call it door number three I suppose — cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias immediately kick in to justify the result, and soon enough the game is over. The prize has been won. It’s as good as it gets. Whatever faults it may have must lie in the recording, not the pressing.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now
Warning: the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this commentary.
Our shootout in 2024 involved all the most important Blue Note labels for this mystery title. New York, Liberty, Black B, White B, all present and accounted for, and all with RVG in the dead wax. (For those who want to know which labels to avoid on Blue Note, you will have to dig through our voluminous reviews and commentaries.)
We don’t need to tell you that those early pressings take us years to find, and cost us a pretty penny — at least the ones that are in audiophile playing condition do — when we can even manage to get hold of them.
And we probably return at least half of what we buy, doubling the trouble of getting a shootout going.
Some folks who produce Heavy Vinyl Blue Note reissues and some of those who review them will tell you that Rudy did not know how to master a record properly. They don’t think his pressings should sound very good to audiophiles, assuming the equipment these audiophiles own is of the highest quality, the way they assume theirs is.
Naturally we think audiophiles who believe any of the above are as wrong as wrong can be. And you can easily prove to yourself just how misguided they are simply by ordering one of our Hot Stamper pressings and playing it.
You can send it back — that’s up to you — but at least you will know how full of it these audiophile reviewers must be to write such nonsense. We love Rudy and make no bones about it. He is one of the All Time Greats.
Our notes for a recent shootout are shown below. There were six pressings in all, each of them mastered by RVG himself, which unsurprisingly are the only ones with any hope of sounding good, if our experience can act as a guide.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
In 2018 we described our Shootout Winner this way:
Amazing sound throughout for Neil’s self-titled debut – shootout winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides. Both sides are rich, full and Tubey Magical with a big bottom end and excellent resolution.
Surely one of Neil’s toughest to find with top quality sound – and only these early pressings with the original mix have the potential to sound as good as this one does.
Six years later, in 2024, we had acquired enough copies of Neil’s debut to do the shootout again. (Yes, it seems that you may have to wait years for a chance to buy a Hot Stamper pressing of the album from us. However, feel free to use the stamper information provided in the blog listing linked here to help you avoid some of the worst sounding stampers of them all, the earliest ones.
To be clear, some of the later label reissues that come in the second cover are even worse sounding than the first mix stamper pressings that come in the first cover.
(A great deal more on the superior sound of some reissues can be found at the bottom of this listing.)
UPDATE 2024
In our latest shootout, the original mix on multiple copies we played did poorly.
We were wrong and for that we apologize. Please ignore what we wrote about the album below back in 2018. The old mix definitely does not beat the new mix.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
Even though they had the Shaded Dog label, some of the later stampers for this record were not very good sounding compared to the ones that won our shootouts.
15s on side one earned a grade that would prevent it from being sold as a Hot Stamper pressing. There was no reason to play side two (13s) since side one eliminated this copy from the competition.
The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, Shaded Dog label or no Shaded Dog label.
Pressings with these stampers might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they would not be worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.
In this case, the conventional wisdom that the original pressings will most likely have superior sound to the later-numbered copies turns out to be right.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
Our good customer Michel wrote to us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Midnight Blue.
Hi Tom,
I used the first track to compare this Super Hot Stamper pressing I bought to a ’63 original to the Music Matters pressing. This was kind of interesting.
The Music Matters is total junk, as it is completely lifeless. It just has that lifeless audiophile feel. So I’ll just take the MM right out of the equation.
My brain is used to the original pressing’s sound, which is more raw sounding.
The SHS is, simply put,way more of everything!
So much so that I had to turn the gain down… my brain just wasn’t used to having so much more sound coming out of the speakers. The tubeyness factor is way way higher than the original. I eventually acclimated and turned it back up.
The original just has that sound that makes me think of long ago, and it is quite vibrant. Perhaps after some dozen listenings I will put it in the sell pile, but not quite yet.
Very happy to have this amazingly lush sounding LP.
Take Care, Michel
Michel,
It’s hard to imagine that you will be able to listen to the original “ear” pressing a dozen times. We never cared for it. Compared to the later pressings we sell it’s just too crude. (That may be what you actually mean by “raw”.)
Rudy would go on to recut the record much better down the road, and those are, in our experience, unbeatable.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now
I don’t think mono works for this Highway 61, so we never carried this Sundazed pressing, and we certainly would not have recommended it back in the days when we were still selling Heavy Vinyl, which we officially stopped doing in 2011).
Stick with the 360 stereo pressings for the best sound. (Other 360 pressings that win shootouts can be found here.)
To see our current selection of Hot Stamper pressings that sound better in mono, click here.
Dylan Discography
Here you will find his albums through 1989, after which you are on your own. The later recordings have never sounded right to us and we have no plans to do shootouts for any of them.
More of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Until we heard the right later pressings, we had always been disappointed with this TAS List recording, wondering what all the fuss was about. The original Shaded Dog pressings we had played left a lot to be desired. Like many of the old records we audition, it badly lacked both highs and lows, our definition of boxy sound.
Well, now we know.
The earliest Shaded Dog pressings have consistently worse sound than the reissues we offer.
We never offered the record in Hot Stamper form because we didn’t think the sound of the originals was all that impressive, TAS List or no TAS List.
Mystery solved, and truly Hot Stampers have now been made available to the discriminating audiophile.
Harry’s list, as was so often the case, did not provide the information needed to find the pressing that captured all the qualities of the recording the way this one does.
Did Harry have a good later pressing?
Did he have an original and simply liked it more than we did?
Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now
For a Living Stereo record from the Golden Age of All Tube recording, especially one from the late-50s, you might expect that the better Shaded Dog pressings would have exceptionally rich, natural sound.
After all, 1958 is clearly one of the great years for analog recordings, as evidenced by this amazing group of albums, all recorded or released in that year.
Unfortunately, the pressings we played of the Berlioz album you see pictured were quite a letdown. We dropped the needle on three different early copies of LSC 2228 with three different sets of stampers and found that none of them were all that impressive, as can be seen from our notes:
We guessed that their final grades after a shootout would probably fall into the range of 1+ or so, just below the cutoff for a minimal Hot Stamper grade (1.5+).
If we’d half a dozen or more to play, some copies would probably be a bit better, some would be a bit worse, but the bulk of them would end up having sound that was merely passable, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning some might not even earn that single plus.)
For now we’re throwing in the towel and moving on to Golden Age records with better prospects.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
UPDATE 2026
We used to buy the German pressings of Beatles’ albums like Help, but eventually we discovered that they were simply not competitive with the better Brits.
The lousy Brits, the ones sitting in the bins of your local record store or the ones you find in most BC-13 Beatles box sets, sure, the better German pressings beat those, but at some point many years ago we chanced upon some amazing sounding British pressings.
They forced us to reckon with the reality that even the best German pressings were very unlikely to reach the audio heights that the better British pressings showed us were possible.
Our commentary from 2011 follows.
We’ve heard some excellent German pressings before, but this time [circa 2011] nothing could touch our best Brit copies. What the best British copies have is more of the Tubey Magic that can typically be heard on early pressings, due no doubt to the fact that they are mastered with tube equipment.