Top Artists – Stephen Stills

Letter of the Week – “I was truly beside myself. I felt like I was in the studio.”

More of the Music of Stephen Stills

Reviews and commentaries for Stephen Stills’ debut

One of our good customers had this to say about Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hi Tom,

I need to write you about the Stephen Stills LP I just listened to. I picked up a copy one day long ago in the past, and it never wowed me.

So later, following the crowd, I purchased the Classic. I remember cranking Black Queen. It sounded audiophile-ish. But I was not taken aback by the sound, filed it, and then virtually never listened to it.

Down deep I knew that it was no good, but I figured it was the music, not so much the pressing.

Now for BR. So once again my mind is totally blown with no wiggle room.

For me this album is really about the last 3 songs on both sides. I have never heard this music how it was intended to sound, ever!

But now I have.

Church was better than phenomenal. Old Times Good Times — the organ on this one is through the roof good and Go Back Home — the guitars and the vocal had such beautiful tones… simply amazing.

Black Queen — Holy Cow… I am just speechless… the guitar tones, the grit in it along with the grit in the vocal… so raw and powerful I found myself making faces… I was truly beside myself. I felt like I was in the studio. Truly an amazing experience for me as I have loved this song for a very long time but never liked how it sounded on my LPs.

But wait there’s more.

Cherokee… Massive instant major warm bass filled the air and the room expanded from the super boomy tubey horns etc… I was screaming (yelping) with joy! What an unbelievable experience for me…. truly amazing. Words just don’t do the experience justice.

You can take that Classic Records copy and chuck it! Some ‘audiophile’ dude will be very happy to buy it when I start selling LPs again which I need to do since they are piling up.

Once again…. so many thanks to all at BR as these sounds are some of best joys in my life.

Michel

Dear Michel,

I’m with you. I never liked the Classic Records pressing on the album and said so in my review for their remastered Manassas:

The Classic pressing was a disaster. Can you imagine adding the kind of grungy, gritty sound that Bernie’s mastering chain is known for (around these parts, anyway) to a recording with those problems already?

It was a match made in hell.

Back in the day when I was selling lots of Classic Heavy Vinyl, this was one of the titles I refused to have anything to do with. This and Stephen Stills’ first album — both were personal favorites of mine and both were awful on Classic Records.

Later in my review I added:

As a general rule, Manassas, like most Heavy Vinyl pressings, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

My question to the Vinyl True Believers of the World is this: Why own a turntable if you’re going to play records like these?

You bought the Classic of Stills’ first album, thought the music wasn’t as good as you remembered it, and proceeded to file it on the shelf where it sat collecting dust for the next twenty years.

This is the heart of the problem with many of the Heavy Vinyl releases that have been coming out since the nineties:

They don’t communicate the joy of the music.

They in fact ruin the music with their lousy sound.

There is no joy to be had by playing them.

They’re a bore and a waste of time.

Why go into detail about their faults? Just recognize that they don’t live and breath the way vintage records do and stop buying them.  Getting rid of the ones you have is also a good idea.

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Stephen Stills / Manassas

More of the Music of Stephen Stills

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Stephen Stills

  • Manassas is back on the site for the first time in years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on all FOUR sides of these vintage Atlantic pressings – fairly (and unusually) quiet vinyl too
  • The sound is big and rich and Tubey Magical, the vocals breathy and immediate
  • And you will not believe all the space and ambience – which of course are all qualities that Heavy Vinyl records have far too little of, and the main reason we have lost all respect for most of them
  • 4 1/2 stars: “A sprawling masterpiece, akin to the Beatles’ White Album, the Stones’ Exile on Main St., or Wilco’s Being There in its makeup, if not its sound.”

Most copies we played were a disaster: grungy, veiled, with no real top end, grainy, stuck in the speakers, with tubby bass — these and other problems were all too common. When a double album sounds like this it makes for a very long day.

What were we listening for exactly? An absence of all the bad qualities mentioned above would be the easiest answer. Once you find a copy without the nasty grit and the grain so many of them have, you quickly key into the lovely ambience that the better copies have, and then you start to notice the Tubey Magic, the richness and sweetness, the extension up top, the kind of transparency that lets you hear into the soundfield and pick out all the players — pretty much the same kinds of things you’re always looking for in a Hot Stamper pressing, except in this case you just had to be willing to look a lot harder.

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Crosby Stills & Nash – Critical Listening Exercise

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

This very old commentary from an early Hot Stamper listing (2005?) for CSN’s debut makes note of some specific qualities in the recording that are a good test for midrange transparency and naturalness.

Here are some other albums with specific advice on what you should be listening for.

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young)? 

Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with bad midrange — like most of them — is a worthless record.

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Listen to the section of the song that starts with Stills’ line “Can I tell it like it is,” with Nash and Crosby behind him — it’s clearly a generation of tape down from what came before and what comes after. The voices and the acoustic guitars just seem to lose their immediacy and transient impact for no apparent reason. Wha’ happen?

It’s the mix, folks, and no mastering engineer can fix it. This album is full of parts and pieces of various songs that are occasionally problematical in that way. Recognize them for what they are, little bumps in the road, a road that led ultimately to one of the greatest pop albums ever made.

On the hot copies the best sounding material will sound amazing, and the lesser sounding material (i.e., the more poorly recorded or mixed bits and pieces) will sound as good as they can sound.

That’s the nature of the beast. It is what it is. The more intensely you listen to a record like this — a true Rock Classic from the 60s, and one we listen to very intensely when doing these shootouts — the more you will notice these kinds of recording artifacts. It’s what gives them “character.”

It’s also what allows you to play a record like this on a regular basis and still find something new in it after all these years.

We’ve made some recent improvements to the stereo and room here at Better Records and I can tell you I heard things in this recording I never knew were there.

What could be more fun than that? The music never gets old, and neither does the sound.

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This Nautilus LP Has the Most Bloated, Ill-Defined, Overblown Bass in the Sad, Sordid History of Half-Speed Mastering

More Crosby, Stills and Nash

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and a Half-Speed Mastered Disaster if there ever was one.

An audiophile record dealer (of course; who else?) once raved to me about Crosby Stills and Nash on Nautilus. I said “What are you talking about? That version sucks!” He replied “No, it’s great. Helplessly Hoping sounds amazing.” 

Now one thing I know about the Nautilus is this: although it is wonderfully transparent in the midrange, it may very well take the cake for the most bloated, out of control bass in the history of Half-Speed mastering.

What song on that album has almost no bass, just lovely voices in the midrange? You guessed it. Helplessly Hoping.

The Nautilus got one track right, and ruined the rest. Using that track for comparison will fool you, and when it comes time to play a side of the album, you will quickly hear what a disaster it is.

Or maybe you won’t. Who else harps on bad Half-Speed Mastered bass outside of those of us who write for this blog? I don’t recall ever reading a word about the subject.

This does not reflect well on the bass response of the modern audiophile stereo. If you would like to improve the bass of your system, the records linked below are good for testing different aspects of bass.

Further Reading

Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.

If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered LPs.

At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is wrong with your copy of the album.

And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.

Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but listening for the details in a recording can be a trap we too easily fall into unless we guard against it.

Tonal balance is the key. Without it no judgments about detail have any real value. 

One example: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic Records pressing gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar doesn’t have the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word detail, since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful “detail.” Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind.

The MoFi guys and the CD guys often fall into this trap.

Get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is usually have systems that make my head hurt.

But most people will never know what they’re missing on Helplessly Hoping, because they will never have an amazing sounding copy of the album. The hot copies are just too rare.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to having to shell out the big bucks we charge for their extremely hard to find debut album, one of the rarest titles we offer, and that would be our moderately pricey copies of So Far, which have the song Helplessly Hoping, and in excellent sound.

In addition, So Far has one of the hardest tracks to reproduce in the entire Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young canon: Find the Cost of Freedom. Scroll down to read more about it.

This record is good for testing the following sonic qualities:

Testing the Cost of Freedom

The better copies of So Far have Demo Disc Quality Sound on this track. You could say everything that needs to be said about the beauty of analog with this one track alone. It’s not even two minutes long, but it’s two really wonderful minutes of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the height of their powers.

The voices should sound as sweet and as silky as any CSN three part harmony you have ever heard. This song rivals Helplessly Hoping for vocal blend. Good pressings of this song have midrange magic to die for.

As this is the last track on side one, closest to the inner groove, most copies are going to have some trace of tracking distortion (or even cutting distortion). The better your arm and cartridge, the less this should present a problem for you. (My Dynavector 17dx/ Triplanar combo tracks the best copies perfectly.) For most weekend warrior audiophiles, it’s never going to vanish completely.

Anti-Skate Testing Too!

This track is a wonderful test for proper anti-skate adjustment. With the anti-skate set right, there should be less harmonic distortion in the voices. A correct setting will also bring out dynamics and energy as well.

Of course, the problem is that if you start playing this song again and again and making small adjustments to the anti-skate, you’re probably going to end up damaging the track.

One solution would be to find a cheap used copy to play with, not one of our wonderful (and pricey) Hot Stampers.

Further Reading

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – You Do the Best You Can with What You’ve Got to Work With

More Crosby, Stills and Nash

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash

The founding members of CSN chose the Albert brothers to engineer this 1977 reunion.

Their most famous album is Layla. Ever heard a great sounding Layla? Me neither. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Layla’s — we’ve done the shootout many times — just as there are better and worse CSNs, but we have never played amazing Demo Disc pressings of either and I doubt we ever will.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side some songs have wonderful sound — the midrange magic, the “breath of life” that makes the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album such a special listening experience — and some don’t.

That’s a recording problem.

It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like Shadow Captain and Dark Star, among others.

But Just a Song Before I Go on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best copies do well and the rest do less well and grade them accordingly, on a curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got to work with.

What to Listen for

  1. Many copies have a tendency to sound dry, so look for the ones that are richer and more full-bodied.
  2. Many copies are opaque and flat, so look for pressings with transparency and depth.
  3. Many copies are lean down low and dull up top, so try to find some with more bass and real top end extension.
  4. And of course you need to find a copy that gets the voices right. CSN’s albums live or die by the quality of their vocals, a subject we’ve discussed on the site at length.

This is how we would approach the problem of finding a top quality CSN, and if you follow our advice, there’s a verg good chance you can find one too.

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Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills – Super Session on the 70s Red Label

More Al Kooper

More Stephen Stills

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Super Session sound this good
  • Engineered by Roy Halee, the man behind one of the best sounding rock records of all time (the self-titled Blood, Sweat and Tears album), the oh-so-analog sound here is especially dynamic and spacious
  • It’s true, the 360 label pressings win our shootouts, but that doesn’t mean the right later label pressings aren’t nearly as good, as is the case with this one
  • For fans of BS&T’s first album (and everybody else), Super Session is a Must Own
  • “Season of the Witch” is crazy good on this vintage Red Label pressing
  • 4 1/2 stars: “This is one of those albums that seems to get better with age… This is a super session indeed.”
  • If you’re a fan of any or all of these guys, this vintage pressing of their 1968 classic belongs in your collection

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Listening in Depth to So Far

More Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Records in Stock

More Commentaries and Letters for So Far

This is a very difficult record to find with proper mastering (and good vinyl, ouch!). It seems that all of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s albums are that way. The average domestic pressing rarely even hints at how well recorded this band really was (and the imports are even worse — we’ve never heard one that didn’t sound dubby, veiled and compressed).

In my experience not even one out of ten LPs sounds right; I put the figure at one out of twenty. Most of them are shrill, dull, grainy, flat, opaque, harsh and in varying degrees suffer from every other mastering and pressing malady known to man.

But the best ones have some tracks in superb sound. When you hear the Hot Stampers for records like this you will simply be AMAZED. If you’ve ever heard a really good If Only I Could Remember My Name, an album that CAN be found with proper mastering, that should give you some idea of how good the first two albums can sound.

Side One

Déjà Vu

When you get a good copy of this album, this song sounds like it was lifted right off of a Hot Stamper copy of Deja Vu itself. It’s so rich and Tubey Magical you’d swear it couldn’t get any better. Huge amounts of deep bass. Acoustic guitars that ring for days. Midrange magic to die for. Not many of them sound this way, unfortunately.

If I could indulge in some more MoFi and Half-Speed bashing for a moment, the bass “solo” at the end of this song is a great test for bass definition. The notes are relatively high, and it’s easy for them to sound blurred and wooly. The MoFi, like virtually all Half-Speed mastered records, has a problem with bass definition. If you own the MoFi, listen for how clearly defined the notes are at the end of this track. Then play any other copy, either of So Far or Deja Vu. It’s a pretty safe bet that the bass will be much more articulate. I know how bad the MOFI is in this respect. Rarely do “normal” records have bass that bad.

Stephen Barncard Does It Again

Listen to this song and compare it to anything on the Barncard-engineered first solo LP by David Crosby. That is the sound of Barncard’s engineering — open, spacious, rich, sweet; tons of deep bass; absolutely no trace of phony eq on vocals; acoustic guitars that ring for days — the man is a GENIUS. Thank god he was involved with music of this quality. If only more of the LP pressings did a better job of revealing the exquisite beauty of the recordings themselves. (I suppose that burden must be carried by the few Hot Stamper copies we can dig up.)

Helplessly Hoping

This is a wonderful song that has a lot of energy in the midrange and upper midrange area which is difficult to get right. Just today (4/25/05) I was playing around with VTA, and this song showed me EXACTLY how to get the VTA right.

VTA is all about balance. The reason this song is so good for adjusting VTA is that the guitar at the opening is a little smooth and the harmony vocals that come in after the intro can be a little bright. Finding the balance between these two elements is key to getting the VTA adjusted properly.

When the arm is too far down in the back, the guitar at the opening will lose its transparency and become dull and thick. Too high in the back and the vocals sound thin and shrill, especially when the boys all really push their harmony parts. The slightest change in VTA will noticeably affect that balance and allow you to tune it in just right.

To be successful, however, there are also other conditions that need to be met. The system has to be sounding right, which in my world means good electricity, so make sure you do this in the evening or on a weekend when the electricity is better.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is that you need a good pressing of this song, and those don’t grow on trees. The vast majority of CSN’s first album and the vast majority of So Far’s are junk. Trying to get them to sound right is impossible, because they weren’t mastered right in the first place. But if you’re one of the lucky few who has a good pressing of Helplessly Hoping, try tweaking your VTA adjustment and see if you aren’t able to dial it in even better than before.

Since the Classic heavy vinyl version is also excellent, it too can be used to set VTA. But of course you are setting VTA for a thicker record, which means you will need to note where the setting is for thick and thin vinyl respectively and make sure that the VTA is correct for each.

As good as the Classic Record is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency that cannot be found on Classic’s version. The Classic gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar doesn’t have the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

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VTA Adjustment Using the Classic Records LP

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

This commentary from way back when (2005!) describes how to go about adjusting your VTA for 200 gram vinyl, using the track Helplessly Hoping from the first album.

Helplessly Hoping is a wonderful song with plenty of energy in the midrange and upper midrange which is difficult to get right. Just today (4/25/05) I was playing around with VTA, having recently installed a new Dynavector DV-20x [a cartridge replaced by the 17D3 soon afterwards] on my table, and this song showed me EXACTLY how to get the VTA right.

VTA is all about balance. The reason this song is so good for adjusting VTA is that the guitar at the opening is a little smooth and the harmony vocals that come in after the intro can be a little bright. Finding the balance between these two elements is key to getting the VTA adjusted properly.

When the arm is too far down in the back, the guitar at the opening will lose its transparency and become dull and thick. Too high in the back and the vocals sound thin and shrill, especially when the boys all really push their harmony. The slightest change in VTA will noticeably affect that balance and allow you to tune it in just right.

To be successful, however, there are also other conditions that need to be met. The system has to be sounding right, which in my world means good electricity, so make sure you do this in the evening or on a weekend when the electricity is better.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is that you need a good pressing of this song, and those don’t grow on trees. The vast majority of CSN’s first album and the vast majority of So Far’s are junk. Trying to get them to sound right is impossible, because they weren’t mastered right in the first place. But if you’re one of the lucky few who has a good pressing of Helplessly Hoping, try tweaking your VTA adjustment and see if you aren’t able to dial it in even better than before.

Since the Classic heavy vinyl version is also excellent, it too can be used to set VTA. But of course you are setting VTA for a thicker record, which means you will need to note where the setting is for thick and thin vinyl respectively and make sure that the VTA is correct for each.

As good as the Classic Record is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency that cannot be found on Classic’s version. The Classic gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar doesn’t have the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word detail, since many audiophiles like bright, phony sound because of all the wonderful “detail.”

The MOFI guys and the CD guys often fall into this trap. Get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left. Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is usually have systems that make my head hurt.

But most people will never know what they’re missing on Helplessly Hoping, because they will never have an amazing sounding copy of the song. The hot copies are just too rare.

Further Reading

Money Can Buy You Happiness, You Just Have to Spend It Right

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

A testimonial from a customer for his Hot Stamper Deja Vu discusses what it takes to get good sound from your stereo. (Hint: it starts with a good sounding record.)

An excerpt. (Bolding and highlighting added.)

Tom:

I received my Deja Vu 2 Pack yesterday. Even though I have not yet listened to all of the mother load that I got on Marathon week – I had to take a listen to this tonight.

Whew – Mother of God!

I have never heard even a semi-decent copy of this album before on either LP or CD – although the music is outstanding and chock full of memories for anyone my age. This white hot stamper is transcendental nirvana. Tom was not kidding when he said master tape sound. The vocals and instrumentals were so alive it was unbelievable. Some of the songs were so good that I just tilted my head back and opened my mouth real wide and just zoned out. Crosby’s vocal on Almost Cut My Hair is masterful. I took your advice and played it twice at even louder volumes. Yikes – better than acapulco gold. Neil Young’s Country Girl was so huge – a vast wall of sound with every single voice and instrument standing out.

This album is even better than I ever thought it was.

I was just not prepared to hear how it really sounds after all that crap I had been listening to for 30 years.

I have come to a conclusion – no matter whether I had the best $50,000 amps in the world or a $29,000 phono supply or the $150,000 Wilson Alexandria speakers or all that other incredible stuff that audiophiles lust for – not one of those items can make a shit record sound anything but like a shit record. There is no overcoming the original source material that you play on your stereo system.

Buying a hot stamper for what can seem like a lot of money – especially if you want a whole lot of them – is really a bargain for those who have invested in a super audio system (with analog capability of course). It is true that the better your system is the more you will get out of hot stampers – but at some point in the process it is more effective to spend available resources on the LPs rather than on more better mega equipment. I just don’t believe an additional $20,000 spent on a better amplifier can deliver as much as $20,000 spent on Super or White Hot Stampers played with my current amplifier. Additionally, I do believe that even a modest analogue system will sound fabulous when you have master tape sound coming out of it.

Bless Tom and all the folks at Better Records. My system enjoyment quotient has increased dramatically this year since I have been buying the good stuff to play on it. Keep up the good work.

Regards,
John

John,

So glad to hear you loved that Deja Vu as much as your enthusiastic letter indicates you did. When we come across a copy as good as the one we sent you, it is indeed a cause for celebration here at Better Records: We know someone is very likely going to have their mind blown, and soon. Obviously, in this case the mind that was blown was yours.

As far as megabuck equipment is concerned, we discussed the subject in a commentary entitled Money Can’t Buy You (Audio) Happiness in which we noted that a certain reviewer’s very, very expensive equipment did not seem to be helping him tell the difference between good sounding records and bad. From our perspective, there’s little difference in the sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressings he seems to like so much from Classic, Sundazed, Speakers Corner and the like. To us almost all of them leave a lot to be desired.

Play Them? Why?

We actually created a section called the Heavy Vinyl Scorecard to point out the many shortcomings — and, to be fair, the occasional strengths — of these pressings. It’s hard for us to get motivated to play any of these records. The vast majority are barely even mediocre and oftentimes they’re downright awful, so what’s the point?

John brings up a related point: No matter how expensive your equipment, you just can’t make your stereo sound good unless you are playing a good sounding record.

Placing a Sundazed or Classic record on a $100,000 turntable is — to our way of thinking — audio insanity.

If that turntable is any good, it’s simply going to make the shortcomings that exist in the mastering of these two famously badly-mastered label’s records even more obvious.

If, on the other hand, it’s hiding those flaws, that’s strong evidence that someone may very well have figuratively flushed a hundred grand down the toilet.

Cost Effective

Good turntables aren’t cheap, but you don’t need to spend six figures to hear good sound. What will sound good is a good sounding pressing, and that’s where John hits the nail right on the head.

Putting twenty more grand in an amp that’s going to be used to play modern pressings is not a cost-effective approach to better sound.

The amp may actually have no effect on the sound, or even a bad effect on the sound.

There is one obvious exception to that rule however: money spent on good sounding records can buy you plenty of audio happiness. When you hear one of our Hot Stampers go head to head with the best pressing you own, it will not take you long to recognize that, for some set of recordings at least, a world of sound exists that you were never aware of before.

Thirty years’ worth of crappy Deja Vu’s wiped away in an instant? Yes, it can be done. Happens all the time in fact.

Few audiophiles have the opportunity to experience such a revelation — it does come at a price to be sure — but for those few it may indeed be described truthfully as “transcendental nirvana.” That’s the way we feel when we stumble upon these amazing pressings in our shootouts, and there’s simply no good reason why your experience should be any different.

That “nirvana” feeling exists in the grooves of the record. You can write your local audio shop twenty thousand dollar checks until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never have that experience until you play the record that has that kind of sound in its grooves. (We have a catchy name for such records. We call them Hot Stampers.)

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