Eddie Kramer, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “I need to catch my breath here.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about the Hot Stamper Zep II he purchased recently, and we exchanged quite a few emails about his findings. 

As promised, we had given him a free copy of the Jimmy Page remaster so that he could compare the two, something we have always encouraged our customers to do, especially in this case.

Tom,

I need to catch my breath here. I rushed home to compare the two Zep 2s you sent. I played Whole Lot of Love on the Jimmie Page cut, then on the WH stamper. I was…stunned. Then I  asked my wife to come in to listen. She’s not a Led Zeppelin fan, so I said “Just listen to a minute of each track”. I played a minute of the Jimmie Page, she nodded, shrugged, and said “It sounds good.” Then I played the WH stamper. About 15 seconds in she exclaimed “What the F*CK?!?!”, and smiled. And wanted to hear the rest of the song.

You guys are geniuses to send the Jimmie Page LP with the WH. My friend insists on comparing it to his Classic Records copy, which we’ll do this weekend. I don’t think it will be a fair contest.

Is it worth $2,499? I know many people would say no. The vast majority. So I’m in the minority on this one.

Bill

Bill,

Such great news! It seems that even people who don’t care for Zep can’t resist the power of a hot copy of Zep II!

I will have more to say, and I wanted to let you know that we still want to hear from those who have compared the two pressings. If you feel like it, tell us what you think the differences are.

And the same with your friend and his Classic repress. That record was so bright it practically peeled the paint in my room. I doubt if it has changed much.

But you can tell me!

As we have said time and time again, the number of people that have ever had the privilege of playing a killer copy of Zep II like the one we sent you is small. It’s like owning your own rocket to Mars.

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Hot Stamper Sharing Can’t Get Off the Ground, How Come?

Basic Concepts and Record Realities Explained 

The above link takes you to our blog. Normally such a link would take you to our in-stock Hot Stamper pressings on the site for the band in question, but we rarely have any Traffic albums to sell these days, which is the case as of this writing.

Finding just the right Traffic pressings, with audiophile-quality vinyl no less, requires effort and resources that we just haven’t been committing to lately. We hope to do better in 2025.

In 2014 somebody on the Hoffman forum tried to get a Hot Stamper thread going under this heading: cheap Hot Stampers revealed.

The thread:

“If you have a “hot stamper” record – one that smokes and takes no prisoners, I mean a BADASS pressing, show it here with matrix info, label or other identifying features so we can all hunt with a bit of a head-start.

“I know these records are out there, just looking for a place to show off their analog glory.

“Here is a recent find that fits the bill and then some:

“Traffic: Best Of Traffic UK.

“Matrix # ILPS 9112 A-1/B-1”

OK, let’s talk about this Island reissue. We know the record well. If it sounds the way the copies we played over the years have sounded, we would say it can be good, not great, and if it qualified for Hot Stamper status, it might — might — earn a plus and a half at best. (1.5+.)

We don’t even bother to pick them up at any price these days, if that tells you anything.

He got very little support in his endeavor. The thread closed after a while with practically nothing in it.

Could it be that the folks on the Hoffman forum have a poor grasp of the amount of effort, time and money it takes to find Hot Stampers?

And, having committed to neither the effort, the time nor the money, find that they have nothing of any value to contribute to such a list?  

Yes, that could be. That definitely could be. Thank god it doesn’t keep them from criticizing those of us who, working in concert with a staff of ten or so, have devoted ourselves to the task and found them by the thousands.

By the way, we know that Traffic title very well. The Pink Label original is by far the best pressing in our experience. No copy we have ever heard on the label promoted by this poster would qualify as much more than a bargain Hot Stamper in comparison to the Pink Label and Pink Rim label pressings that we sell, although of course, not having heard his copy, we can’t say it’s not fabulous. 

It’s just not very likely to be fabulous. 

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Hot Stampers Helped Some Audiophiles Hear What They’d Been Missing

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he played at a stereo show recently. You can read all about it here.

We carried on the conversation:

Tom,

Thank you and for sure I’d be more than happy to spread the word more and help out! Send me cards for sure. I’m def a Better Records disciple.

You should consider teaming up with a room at the show next time. I think worth your while. Time to break the grip of the MoFi Mafia at these shows.

All the best, Mike

Mike,

We went to some shows years ago and nothing came of it.

It may turn out that none of these people will ever want to pay good money — let’s be honest, a lot of good money — for Hot Stampers. I wrote about it here.

Experience over many years has borne out this view, disappointing as it may be.

The audiophiles who go to shows for some reason don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around the concept of Hot Stampers.

Hard to imagine that none of them can afford our records. The money someone might pay for three wacky MoFis or three Analogue Productions disasters would probably get you one very good sounding Hot Stamper pressing. In my book, one good record that you might actually listen to and enjoy often is a whole lot better than any number of modern records that you will seldom play and more than likely simply file away on the shelf where their sole purpose will be to collect dust.

I’m guessing. I don’t really know what people do with all these mediocre sounding reissues. I wrote about what I suspect happens to them here.

I Beg the Question

But this is purely an exercise in “begging the question.”

I’m assuming things I do not know to be true, in order to make the very point I have the burden of proving.

To make my case, I would need to provide evidence to back up the claim that these records don’t get played and enjoyed. To be honest, I have no evidence whatsoever that the owners of these records don’t enjoy the hell out of them.

It’s a naked expression of prejudice on my part. I’m assuming that what’s obviously true for me must be true for others. I don’t enjoy playing these Heavy Vinyl records, and I think that other audiophiles must be as disappointed by them as I am.

But Heavy Vinyl records are selling very well these days. Somebody is buying them.

And they buy them even though, as our writer points out, they cannot begin to compete with good vintage pressings.

More question begging? Not really. This happens to be something I can provide plenty of evidence for and can prove with ease.

Practically every record on our site is a rebuttal to audiophile pressings from every era, made by every company in the remastering business.

To find out how wrong these modern records are, all you need do is buy one of our Hot Stampers and play them head to head.

Oh well. All we can do is keep trying to get the word out. And we thank you for your help showing audiophiles what they are missing.

Because explaining doesn’t work. Only hearing works.

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Magical Mystery Touring – Our View from the Nineties

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

We discuss in detail what we’re listening for and what the best copies seem to do well that the run-of-the-mill copies simply do not.

If you own a copy of the German MMT, play yours and listen for what we’re listening for. It’s all laid out in the track commentary below.

Side One

Magical Mystery Tour

The fact that this is a key track should be obvious to anyone who has ever played the album. If you don’t have a good copy of the MMT this song will take your head off. Only the German pressings have any real hope of getting it right — the MOFI, British, Japanese, domestic, etc. are uniformly awful in my experience: aggressive and irritating, the worst being the MOFI I would guess.

The German ones break down into three groups – too smooth; just right; and a bit bright or thin. Now remember, almost every copy of this record I played had the exact same stamper numbers. You can’t tell one from another except by dropping the needle on them. There is no visual clue on the record to associate with the sound, no possibility of bias. What comes out of the speakers is all I had to go by.

And it’s easy to confuse the overly smooth ones with the best ones, because on the song MMT smooth is a good thing . But when is smooth too smooth? That’s where track two comes in.

The Fool On The Hill

This song is full of airy flutes, woodwinds and the like. They should sound harmonically extended, delicate and sweet. We talked about the sound of the flutes on another record recently, Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s as a good a test for this album as it is for that one.

Having said that, what separates the killer copies from the merely excellent ones is the quality of the flute sound. When you can hear the air going through the flute, and follow the playing throughout the song, you have a superbly transparent copy with all the presence and texture of the best. If the flute sounds right Katz’s voice will too. The sound will be Demonstration Quality of the highest order. Want to shoot out two different copies of this album on side one? Easy. Just play this track and see which one gets the flute right.

On the best copies Paul’s voice is amazingly present. You should feel as though you could reach out and touch him. Which means there are two basic elements to listen for in this song, both of which must be proportional and balanced. First, the flutes must sound open and airy. Then, Paul’s voice must retain its lower-midrange body and warmth without sounding veiled or thick in any way, yet have excellent presence. Not too many copies, maybe one out of ten, can really pull it off. It’s amazing when they do though!

If the first track is alive but not aggressive, and Fool sounds the way I describe it above, the only thing left is The Walrus Test. Feel free to skip to the last track if you like.

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Led Zeppelin / II – A New Player Joins the Fun

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Aaron writes to us often about records. Here is his latest offering. (I’ve made some comments of my own. They are the ones that are not italicized.)

Hi Tom,

Today I did something I’ve wanted to do for years – I played The Two Game.

The Two Game is based on The Blue Game, the one we created for Joni’s Blue Album way back in 2007. That game was apparently harder to play than we thought since nobody seemed to want to play it.

The Rhino pressing’s shortcomings were clear to us at the time, all the way back in 2007, and we noted that it was even superior to the best Bernie Grundman-mastered vintage pressings in one respect. But it seems that no one besides us could figure out what was going on with the sound of the record, even after we gave our customers a free copy so they could play it at home head to head against our Hot Stamper pressing.

With my stereo finally dialed-in and my family all out of the house, I dived in to the Page remaster of Zep 2, side by side with my White Hot Stamper. To help the comparison, I backdropped it with a bunch of other copies I’ve accumulated over the years.

Tom, I figure I’ll need several tries to get to the bottom of this, but it’s going to be an awesome ear-training experience for me, and if I have to listen to any record on repeat, this is a good one. So let me share my thoughts from this first comparison, and maybe you can point out some directions to go in next time I’m up for trying it again.

I chose The Lemon Song, because it is awesome, and because I view it as one of the tracks that’s most balanced overall, with all the instruments contributing about equally, and relatively devoid of studio tricks. Like a kid left to eat all he wants of his favorite candy, I had to eventually stop just from fatigue and satiation.

I recommended The Lemon Song to a customer who wanted to play the game, writing:

Pay special attention in your shootout to The Lemon Song. I am going to discuss some things I learned about it recently. See how all your versions do on the song and what you think each version is doing right and wrong. Enjoy and have fun.

I think the Page remaster actually corrects a problem with this track that exists on all the original versions of the album mastered by Robert Ludwig. For anyone else who wants to play the game, please consider this a clue.

Another piece of advice would be that The Lemon Song is not a good track for overall testing.

There are much better tracks for that purpose, tracks that will make it much easier to recognize what is so fundamentally different about the two pressings.

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Can Houses of the Holy Get Any Better? Apparently It Can

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling Led Zeppelin power – our most recent Shootout Winning copies of Houses of the Holy knocked us out with their Demo Disc sound.

The Tubey Magical acoustic guitars here should be a wake up call to everyone that any attempt to remaster this album — to outdo Robert Ludwig and his awesome tube compressors and hi-rez transistor cutting equipment — is bound to fail.

This kind of sound is gone and it is never coming back.

Here are our notes for the top two copies from our recent shootout, each of which had one Shootout Winning side and one that came close but did not quite earn the top grade.

Side One

Track Three (Over the Hills and Far Away)

  • Upfront and detailed and breathy
  • Spacious
  • Big and wide when it kicks in

Track One (The Song Remains the Same)

  • Huge and rich and weighty
  • Vocals are less veiled
  • Richest, with the most extension high and low

Note that we played both a rocker as well as a quieter, more acoustic track. This is standard operating procedure. Both of these very different sounding songs have to sound their best.

Side two had a few problems which kept it from doing as well as side one.

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A Pink Label Island LP Left Us with Egg on Our Face

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.

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Are Your Cellists Digging In on I Am the Walrus?

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles’ Music Available Now

This commentary was written many years ago.

Over the last decade I Am The Walrus has evolved into a good test for side one, a fact that came as a complete surprise to me. As I was listening to the various copies in a shootout years ago I noted that the opening cellos and basses in the right channel were often tonally identical from copy to copy, but sounded quite a bit more lively and energetic on some pressings relative to others. Was it EQ? Level? Compression?  

Why so much more passion from the players on some copies and not others?

As I tried to puzzle it out, playing first one copy and then another, it became clear to me what was happening. The cellists and the bassists were just plain digging HARDER into the strings on the best copies. When you see live classical music, the cellists at the front of the orchestra are usually sawing away with abandon when the music is really going. They dig their bows hard into the strings to make them vibrate as loud as possible. To make their instruments heard in the back row it becomes a matter of muscle, of pure physical exertion.

So armed with the copies where the string players are working the hardest, I checked the other tracks. Sure enough, the opening cut, MMT, jumped out of the speakers with the most energy I had heard on any copy. As I went through the tracks one by one, they had the most life of any of the copies I had been listening to. To use a word that was popular at the time, the music was HAPPENING.

This was the final piece to the puzzle. Tonality always comes first. Frequency extension; lack of distortion; rich, powerful bass — these are important qualities as well. But the life of the music is in the micro and macro dynamics, and that is what I had not been paying sufficient attention to during the shootout.

That was until I listened to Walrus and heard the players working up a good healthy sweat. Then I knew I had a Hot Stamper. And when I played the not-so-Hot Stampers, the string guys sounded like session musicians picking up a paycheck.

Where was their passion? Didn’t they realize they were making a classic?

If you get the right pressing they sure were!

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Led Zeppelin II on Classic Records – Seriously, What Could Be Sadder?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

An unmitigated disaster — ridiculously bright and ridiculously crude.

In short, a completely unlistenable piece of garbage, and, along with the MoFi pressing from 1982, one of the worst sounding versions of the album ever made.

Over the years we have done many Led Zeppelin shootouts, often including the Classic Heavy Vinyl Pressings as a “reference.” After all, the Classic pressings are considered by many — if not most — audiophiles as superior to other pressings.

What could be sadder?

In fact, you will find very few critics of the Classic Zep LPs outside of those of us (me and the rat in my pocket) who write for this Better Records, and even we used to recommend three of the Zep titles on Classic: Led Zeppelin I, IV and Presence when they first came out.

Wrong on all counts.

Since then we’ve made it a point to review most of the Classic Zeps, a public service of Better Records. We don’t actually like any of them now, although the first album is still by far the best of the bunch.

Below you will find our reviews of the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.

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Hey Mr. Fantasy – Where’s the Bass?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

For our newest take on the sound of the various labels and stampers for Mr. Fantasy, please click here.

A long, long time ago, probably at the start of the 2000s, we put up this early UK pressing on the Island pink label.

Charged good money for it, too, justified by the fact that the early pink label pressing would be assumed to have the best sound for audiophiles in search of higher fidelity.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right reissues 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.

The pink label pressing we review below is very unlikely to earn a grade high enough to qualify for Hot Stamper status.

Our Old Listing

This pink label original Island pressing has amazingly sweet, open, extended and transparent mids and highs.

It has two major shortcomings: a lack of bass, and a fair amount of surface noise.

If you can add a few — let’s say three — dB around 50 cycles and can put up with some surface noise and scratches, you are guaranteed to hear some wonderful sound in the best tubey Island tradition. 

Side two sounds better than side one. It has more bass and is more tonally correct overall.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are happy to help you do that.)

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