Top Artists – Pink Floyd

We Get Letters – “We could appreciate every tiny decision Heiftez was making. When the orchestra came in, it was thunder.”

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Dear Tom,

The next best thing to a big pile of Better Records is a friend with a big pile of Better Records.

Last night my good buddy Bill came over with a selection from his recent spate of hot stamper purchases.

You remember Bill, right? He’s the friend who knew I was into stereos, so he came over for some advice about how to assemble a top of the line modern digital playback system.

I played him my White Hot Stamper of Rumours, he buried his face in his hands, and took a deep plunge into building himself a Port-recommended vinyl playback rig, and he’s now a Better Records aficionado.

First up, we played his White Hot Stamper of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. It was magnificent. We could appreciate every tiny decision Heiftez was making. When the orchestra came in, it was thunder.

Then, we played my Super Hot Stamper. Same stamper, and mine had quieter vinyl, but man, the sound just wasn’t the same. Mine was more shrill (but slightly), and the orchestra was less meaty (but slightly.) I’ve always loved my copy, still do, but the White Hot Stamper clearly improved on it. We were simply hearing more music.

I know a lot of people say they have great sounding records. For anybody who thinks they may have stumbled across a hot stamper out in the wild, I have one simple test: turn it up. If it’s a true White Hot Stamper, you just want to keep turning up the volume. If you get to the point where you say, “actually, that’s a little too loud. Let me just dial it back a little. Ah, that’s better.” Well then, you don’t have a hot stamper on your hands. White Hot Stampers just invite you to play them loud. There’s no limit, they just cohere without getting shrill or strident. It’s a truly strange effect, and until you hear it for yourself, you won’t believe me.

Next up, we put on Bill’s White Hot Stamper of The Wall. Very loud, of course. It was probably the best my stereo has ever sounded.

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Dark Side of the Moon – “A Wasted Purchase”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a White Hot Stamper pressing of Dark Side of the Moon he purchased a recently: Bill writes:

No, not my White Hot Stamper purchase.

But, rather, my purchase of an original UK edition, the so-called Holy Grail of pressings.

When I purchased the White Hot Stamper of Dark Side of the Moon a couple of weeks ago (for what seemed like an outrageous amount of money), I thought I’d compare it to the version I had, the 50th Anniversary, and send it back for a refund if it didn’t blow me away. It was the same strategy I had used several years ago when I bought a White Hot Stamper of Led Zeppelin II.

And the same thing happened to me this time that happened last time—the White Hot Stamper blew me away! It was so transparent. I heard things in the mix I had never heard before. The bass was tight, and the soundstage and “air” were HUGE. It was as big of a night/day comparison as the Led Zeppelin II comparison was.

Now, the bad news, for me.

Every source I checked said the original UK pressing is far and away the best pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

So I bit the bullet and bought a pressing on eBay. It was, as advertised, in mint condition, with almost no surface noise.

And it was AWFUL compared to the White Hot Stamper. The soundstage was tiny in comparison, the bass was bloated, and overall it sounded muffled and lifeless. And, unfortunately, that UK pressing didn’t come with a money back guarantee. So I have a nice collectible on my hands that I will never listen to.

As Tom has pointed out many times, there are variations within pressings, so it might be that I just got a dud of a first pressing. One thing I have learned, though, is that even your outrageously priced White Hot Stampers, and maybe even especially your outrageously priced White Hot Stampers, are, in fact, a good bargain. Audio nirvana.

Bill

Bill,

Thanks for your letter, and sorry to hear you threw all that money away on a white elephant you will never find any use for. Unlike our records, at least it has some collector value. Discogs and ebay are your two best options for helping it find a new home.

The one good use I can think of for it would be to use it as a comparison pressing next time somebody comes over to your house and wants to hear the album. You could do a little shootout for them, just to see how far their jaw drops when the needle hits the groove on your Hot Stamper pressing.

I’m not going to say “I told you so,” but what I will do is refer you to the scores of commentaries on this blog telling you not to believe a word you read written by any of the self-described experts in the world of record collecting. Their advice just cost you a big chunk of dough. Now will you believe me?

Putting your faith in their record knowledge often turns out to be a one-way ticket to an expensive, non-refundable lesson. It has been for me anyway. I got hold of an early UK Dark Side and was disappointed too, though probably not as disappointed as you were, as mine was merely mediocre, maybe somewhere in the 1.5+ range.

We’ve all been there.

And if we hadn’t been there, we probably wouldn’t have learned much of anything about records, because experience is by far the best teacher. When it comes to audio and records, it’s practically the only teacher, something we have tried to change, with limited success, through this blog.

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Letter of the Week – “I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the Hot Stamper Aqualung I just bought.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

This testimonial letter comes from our good customer Roger, who was blown away by the Hot Stamper pressing of Aqualung we sent him [many, many years ago].

Roger, as expected, did a thorough shootout of his own, comparing of our Hot Stamper against the audiophile usual suspects. The result? Another knockout for our Hot Stamper pressing.

Note that a well known audiophile reviewer did his own shootout for the album years ago, failing miserably, unlike our good customer Roger, who succeeded admirably.

Hi Tom,

I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the hot stamper Jethro Tull Aqualung I just bought. Darn you again and your hot stampers.

To give you some idea of how many times I have heard this album, backtrack to 1971 when it came out. On a Boy Scout trip a friend of mine had a portable 8-track tape player and this one tape, Aqualung. I remember sleeping on one of the seats in a car with the Aqualung tape on infinite repeat all night. In high school I had the 8-track and listened to this record hundreds of times.

Through the years after becoming an audiophile I bought many different copies looking for the ultimate-sounding LP, finally settling on the MFSL version, which I bought when it came out.

So I had a good time comparing 4 copies:

    1. the MFSL half-speed,
    2. the DCC version,
    3. the 25th anniversary digitally remastered copy,
    4. and the Hot Stamper.

First I tried the 25th anniversary and it was just as I remembered it — it sounds digital, like a CD. Lots of detail, but hard, hyped, edgy, flat soundstage, compressed dynamics. As digital usually sounds, guitars were harsh and jumped unnaturally out of the mix.

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Letter of the Week – “…never heard the details in the guitars and cymbals and keyboards like this.”

Pink Floyd Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

One of our best customers, Roger, received his $150 Hot Stamper [those were the days!] ’Wish You Were Here’ and went straight to work comparing it with the various other pressings he owned: two different CBS Half Speeds. The not-so-shocking results are presented in detail below.

Hi Tom,

I received your Pink Floyd ‘Wish You Were Here’ Hot Stamper and compared it to my CBS Half-Speed (I found a bunch of these Half-Speeds in a bargain bin years ago and did a shootout to select the best one) and the pressing that I considered the best, the Japanese Mastersound Half-Speed, for which I paid dearly.

Drum roll, please while Vanna hands me the sealed envelope………… and the winner is: Surprise — the Hot Stamper!

And it wasn’t even close.

Once I heard the center-of-the-earth bass on the Hot Stamper ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, it was all over. I was amazed at how bright the CBS was, transparent yes, but bright and no bass and no body to the saxophones and voices. The Mastersound was better-balanced in that the highs were tamed, but no real dynamics and the bass was flabby.

I have heard this record hundreds of times, but never heard the details in the guitars and cymbals and keyboards like this.

And did I mention the huge, huge soundstage with a wall of sound like that of other Pink Floyd records? Nice job as usual.

Roger,

Thanks for verifying the accuracy of our Hot Stamper claims once again. The decent sounding Half Speed Mastered records, CBS and otherwise, can be counted pretty easily on one’s fingers. We could debunk them all day long if we wanted to (and had ten times the staff). It doesn’t take long to hear how anemic the sound is compared to The Real Thing, the real thing being, of course, a vintage pressing.

The copy you bought was rated A Plus on both sides, two full sonic grades below the best, so you can imagine how good those copies sound. But since neither you nor I are made out of money, for $150 you now own a copy that will trounce anything you throw at it, especially if what you throw at it is an audiophile pressing.

Those moribund LPs belong on Ebay where all the Technics turntable owners of the world can find them in order to complete their — let’s be honest — silly and ultimately pointless audiophile collections.

Modern equipment shows half-speed foolishness for what it is. You heard it, we heard it, and slowly but surely we are spreading the word to the rest of the audiophile community.

Thanks again. It’s a big job and we need all the help we can get.

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Letter of the Week – “…the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Dark Side of the Moon he purchased a while back:

Dear Tom and Fred,

This is one of those records where I already had a handful of well-regarded pressings. How intriguing that it was such an obscure pressing that won your shootout! [1]

I compared the WHS to my early US pressing (Ken Perry mastered [2]), my MoFi [3], a Japanese “blue triangle” pressing, and of course, the 2016 remaster [4].

Sure, there are tons of sought-after pressings that go for prices even more exorbitant than what I paid you, none of which I’ve heard, so I guess it’s not a proper shootout. But, at least among the ones I have, the WHS bested them all handily. In each of the others I was able to find something that I could appreciate, that on its own compared well to the WHS. This is such a great, and well-recorded, album that any pressing of it is going to have something worthwhile to offer.

The Japanese pressing came closest to the WHS. [Doubtful we would agree with you on the merits of this Japanese pressing. We rarely like them, and we like them less with each passing year.]

At the other end of the spectrum the 2016 remaster, noted for its great bass, just sounded clogged and thudding [5].

Compared to each of them, the WHS is huge and clear. It had ALL the positive attributes I heard in the others. Is it 15x better than my next-best copy? Objectively, probably not. But, subjectively, it must be, since I’m keeping it.

Since the hot stamper arrived the day after my Legacy Signature III’s got here, it was one of the first records I played on them. What a great pairing they are! 

This was of course the first mini-shootout I’ve done using the Legacys. What a great window into a record these speakers provide. I switched back to my Bowers and Wilkins 805s and re-ran the shootout, just to see if my impressions would still align. They did, with the hot stamper providing more vividness and a bigger sound than the other pressings did, even on the B&Ws.

But on the bigger speakers the hot stamper stands apart from the others by a wider margin.

Thank you both for all the great records you find, and thank you Tom for the stereo advice. You keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing.

Aaron

Aaron,

Glad to hear you are a Legacy man now. We love our Legacy Speakers and can’t imagine doing shootouts without them. (The old ones, not the newer models.) The Big Speaker sound, at loud levels, is what allows a record like Dark Side of the Moon to be every bit the immersive experience we know it can be if you have a top quality pressing to play. Now you know it too.

And thanks for doing the shootout so that you know exactly what our best copies of Dark Side are capable of. If you make any improvement to your system, be sure to go back to this Dark Side and hear the change for yourself.

Then play any of these other pressings and note how the gap has widened. That is our experience and we expect you will find the same differences in your listening room as well.

The following notes may be of general interest:

[1} Obscure pressings that sound better than everything else are our bread and butter here at Better Records.

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Letter of the Week – “The best one from you guys that I’ve bought is easily Wish You Were Here.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I’ve bought several LPs from you guys and have been exceptionally impressed. The eponymous Dire Straits plus Breakfast in America arrived yesterday, and are excellent.

The best one from you guys that I’ve bought is easily Wish You Were Here. That is an album meant to be played at full volume from start to finish, loving every minute. 

Keep up the good work! 

Anyway, thanks from a very satisfied customer.

Dear Sir,

Thanks, glad to see you liked all three as much as we did.

We love pointing out that the Shootout Winning copies of Wish You Were Here are not originals, and not pressed in the U.K., contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused by audiophiles and record collectors the world over, and with great confidence no less.

We used to think those were the best too, but years ago we took a chance and bought some other pressings we had heard might be good. Sure enough they beat the best Brits we had ever played. That doesn’t happen very often, almost never in fact, but it definitely happened in this case.

Who knew? Not us, and even we only learned of the best pressings about ten years ago.

And nobody who writes about records to this day is aware of these very special pressings as far as we know.

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Expanding Space Itself on The Dark Side of the Moon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pink Floyd’s Albums Available Now

Many years ago, right around 2015 I believe, we played a copy with all the presence, all the richness, all the size and all the energy we could have ever hoped to hear on a pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.

It did it all and then some.

The raging guitar solos (there are three of them) on Money seemed to somehow expand the system itself, making it bigger and more powerful than I had ever heard.

Even our best copies of Blood Sweat and Tears have never managed to create such a huge space with that kind of raw power. This copy broke through all the barriers, taking the stereo system to an entirely new level of sound.

Listen to the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage on this copy that I’ve never heard as clearly before. On most copies you can’t even tell they are there.

Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve never heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion on this track.

One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, do no more than hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. When you don’t — the reason we do shootouts in a nutshell — it’s not.

The best sounding parts of this record are nothing less than ASTONISHING. Money is the best example I can think of for side two. When you hear the sax player rip into his solo as Money gets rockin’, it’s almost SCARY! He’s blowin’ his brains out in a way that has never, in my experience anyway, been captured on a piece of plastic. After hearing this copy, I remembered exactly why we felt this album must rank as one of the five best Rock Demo Discs to demonstrate the superiority of analog. There is no CD, and there will never be a CD, that sounds like this.

In fact, when you play the other “good sounding” copies, you realize that the sound you hear is what would naturally be considered as good as this album could get. But now we know better. This pressing took Dark Side to places we never imagined it could go.

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Obscured By Cloudy Japanese Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

When I was just getting up to speed in audio and exploring the world of music available on vinyl in the 70s, many of the stereo stores I frequented carried Japanese pressings. They were widely believed to have superior sound relative to their domestic counterparts — in this case, the mass-produced pressings I would see at the Tower Records right across from the Sports Arena in my hometown of San Diego. I went there at least once a week, probably more like two or three times.

Tower was far and away the best place to go record shopping in those days. The store was huge and they had dramatically more stock than Licorice Pizza or The Wherehouse.

They also had a separate section for Half-Speed mastered pressings from a number of labels, which of course was the first place in the store I would visit, digging through the bins to see what new remastered titles may have been produced for audiophiles searching for the ultimate in sound quality.

Of course, I identified as just such a person. In terms of sound quality, and with the extremely limited knowledge I had acquired at the time, I believed I set a high standard for the sound of the records I bought. I was willing — eager even, you could even say excited — to pay whatever premium price I had to for a record that was sure to deliver superior sound quality. To me, in the late 70s, that meant two things: direct to disc recordings, and Half-Speed mastered pressings.

(There was a another category of records that did not fall into the above two, best exemplified by American Grammaphone and the Fresh Aire series, but the less said about those schlocky releases the better, other than to point out that some of their titles are TAS list carryovers from HP’s time running the Super Disc list, specifically Fresh Aire 2 and 3, both best avoided.)

And, like any other open-minded individual, when it came to Japanese vinyl I was willing to give a few a spin.

However, the more of them I bought, the more clear it became to me that even the best of them sounded mediocre (veiled, smeary and dubby from second generation tapes) and more often than not they were just plain awful. (Second generation tape issues being the main problem, of course, with the additional insult of poor tonality, the result of being mastered using wacky equalization, typically with added brightness where none was needed.)

Pink Floyd

The notes for the Pink Floyd album you see below, Obscured by Clouds, were written sometime in March of 2025 as part of the shootout we conducted for the album.

If we assume it would be an audiophile who would be attracted to this pressing, perhaps for its quieter playing surfaces, perhaps operating under the assumption that the Japanese engineers mastering the record would be more likely to do a better job as well, then what we have here is a textbook case of an audiophile bullshit pressing.

One that sounds nothing like the album is supposed to, based on having played a number of exceptionally good sounding copies, all British and all on the Green Harvest label, mastered from good tapes, sometimes by the legendary Harry T. Moss. We feel we are more than qualified to make these judgments. If we can’t make them, nobody can.

Discogs allows us to glean some information regarding the desirability of this Japanese reissue with the record buying public currently in the market for Pink Floyd vinyl who register on their site.

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Letter of the Week – “I heard things on there that I never heard before.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some a Hot Stamper pressing of Meddle he purchased a while back:

Hi Tom,

Got the Meddle album already.  I sat down as soon as I opened it and listened to both sides with the volume up.

Absolutely blew me away. I heard things on there that I never heard before. Or I just heard them better.

I didn’t have to listen to my other copies. I knew right away this one was IT.

Listening to a record like this just gets me thinking what the other Hot Stampers sound like.

Steve

Steve,

Thanks for writing.

You are completely right. Some pressings are so obviously superior that no comparisons are necessary. Going back to your old copies would be shocking — how could I have put up with such substandard sound quality?

In 2007 we discovered the Hottest Stampers of them all, a reissue pressing if you can believe it — something we have no trouble believing as we much prefer to let the evidence be our guide when it comes to which are the best pressings, not theories, preconceived ideas or conventional wisdom. From that point on there was no going back.

It turns out that there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for  Meddle.  This link will take you to other titles with one set of stampers that always come out on top.

The Prelude Record Cleaning System had a lot to do with that breakthrough, and we have been big fans of the system Mr. Walker developed ever since. In addition to getting them clean, we know of nothing that does as much for the sound of records.

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Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

  • A vintage copy of this mindblowing recording that is guaranteed to rock your world with superb Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The transparency, the clarity, the energy, the power – it’s all here on this very special import pressing
  • A Top 100 album (Top Ten actually) and Demo Disc to rival the most amazing sounding records of all time
  • 5 stars: “…what gives the album true power is the subtly textured music… no other record defines [Pink Floyd] quite as well as this one.”
  • A Top 100 album (Top Ten actually) and a Rock Demo Disc to rival the most amazing sounding records of all time
  • 5 stars: “…what gives the album true power is the subtly textured music… no other record defines [Pink Floyd] quite as well as this one.”

This vintage import pressing has the presence, the richness, the size and the energy you always wanted to hear on Dark Side — AND NOW YOU CAN!

Take the clocks on Time. There are whirring mechanisms that can be heard deep in the soundstage. On most copies, you can’t even tell they are there. Talk about transparency — I bet you’ve NEVER heard so many chimes so clearly and cleanly, with such little distortion, as you will on this copy.

One thing that separates the best copies from the merely good ones is super-low-distortion, extended high frequencies. How some copies manage to correctly capture the overtones of all the clocks, while others, often with the same stamper numbers, can barely hint at them, is something no one can explain. But the records do not lie. Believe your own two ears. If you hear it, it’s there. 

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