Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

We used to think that The Best of Traffic had better sound than the early pressings of Mr. Fantasy, but in a head to head comparison with a killer copy we played not long ago, we were proved wrong, or, perhaps more accurately, we proved ourselves wrong, something we pride ourselves in being able to do by carrying out regular shootouts for records we’ve been listening to for more than twenty years.

Oddly enough, in our shootouts we often learn new things about records we thought we knew well.

Here is what we had to say about one of the tracks on Mr. Fantasy that we thought sounded dramatically better on The Best of Traffic back around 2005:

Best evidence: Heaven Is In Your Mind, the second track on side one. It is amazing sounding here and such a disappointment on every Pink Label Island original we’ve played.

Once you know how good that song can sound — by playing a Hot Stamper copy of Best of Traffic like this one — going back to the original version of the song found on the album is not just a letdown, it’s positively painful. Where’s the analog magic? The weight to the piano? The startling clarity and super-spaciousness of the soundfield? The life and energy of the performance?

They’re gone, brother. Not entirely gone, mind you, more a shadow of what they should be, but once you’ve heard the real thing it’s not a lot of fun listening to a shadow.

You can be sure that we did not know what we were talking about when we wrote all that.

What we had done is assumed that all the pink label pressings of Mr. Fantasy sounded like the one we played, something we’ve been telling audiophiles for twenty years not to do, because collecting records by label is a fool’s game.

In this case, clearly we are the fools.

It probably — probably, since all the evidence points in the same direction — had the stampers you see below, apparently known as an Orlake Pressing, something I knew nothing about until reading about it on Discogs just now.

• Matrix / Runout (Side A, stamped): ILPS+9061+A
• Matrix / Runout (Side B, stamped): ILPS+9061+B

These same stampers would be used to press the Pink Rim Label copy you see below. We put it into a recent shootout and described it as having “hollow, dubby” sound.

Yes, we heard the very same “dubby” sound on a copy we played about twenty years ago, and thought all the early pressings on Island, pink and pink rim alike, had these same mastering shortcomings.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right UK pressings on Island of Mr. Fantasy are dramatically better sounding.

In fact, they handily win our shootouts, something they have been doing for at least the last ten years or so.

We’ve run into so many sonically-flawed Pink label Island pressings by now that hearing one sound lackluster if not actually awful doesn’t phase us in the least.

Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.

But before that, back in the dark days of the early 2000s, we clearly were lacking a comprehensive understanding of the sound of the various UK pressings of the album.

There was a great deal of research and development left to be done. Eventually our efforts led to a breakthrough in 2006.

For more than twenty years, this is the kind of work we have undertaken. Why? Because we get paid to do it.

We may be the most knowledgeable experts on the planet when it comes to the best sounding pressings of audiophile-quality recordings — if we’re not I’d like to know who is, and how they came by that information — but that doesn’t mean we know it all.

If we come across that way, it’s the result no doubt of our enthusiastic responses to the hundreds of amazing records we’ve had the pleasure to hear. For example, here’s one, and of course there are literally hundreds and hundreds of others with similarly over-the-top notes. Allow me to apologize for any misunderstanding our commentary may have caused.

One thing we do know: all knowledge, of records or anything else you care to name, is provisional.

If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section.

We regularly learn from our mistakes — like the record reviewed here — and we hope you do too.

However, we learn things from the records we play — not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our record experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and rankings for all the records in between.

We’ve achieved our results by purposefully ignoring everything there is to know about a record — who made it, how they made it, when they made it — everything, that is, but the sound coming out of the speakers of our reference system.

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