Little Feat Albums with Hot Stampers
Little Feat Albums We’ve Reviewed
More Breakthrough Pressing Discoveries
A classic case of Live and Learn
In 2009 we had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing we listed:
This German import pressing of Waiting for Columbus is much better sounding than the typical Mastering Lab-mastered copy.
This German pressing is similar to one that came from my own personal collection, accidentally discovered way back in the early ’80s as I recall. It KILLED my domestic original, and got some things right that even my treasured Mobile Fidelity pressing couldn’t. We have been meaning to do a shootout for this album for at least the last five years, but kept running into the fact that in a head to head shootout the right MoFi pressing — sloppy bass and all — was hard to beat.
This is no longer the case, courtesy of that same old laundry list you have no doubt seen on the site countless times: better equipment, tweaks, record cleaning, room treatments, etcetera, etcetera. Now the shortcomings of the MoFi are clear for all to see, and the strengths of the best non-half-speed mastered pressings are too, which simply means that playing the MoFi now is an excruciating experience.
All I can hear is what it does wrong. I was so much happier with it when I didn’t know better.
That same laundry list continued to pay big dividends, and right around 2017 or so the best original domestic Mastering Lab copies started to sound much more right to us than the German ones. The German pressings can be good, but the TML pressings are the only ones we expect to win shootouts from now on.
But who knows? We could find something even better down the road. That’s what shootouts are for. (more…)