Geoff Emerick, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Our Four Plus Abbey Road Shootout Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This listing is from many years ago, possibly as early as 2010.

  • Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how we go about finding them.
  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of nowhere, to the surprise of the listening panel, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it fundamentally changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
  • Breakthroughs often come about because the conventional wisdom we had been relying on up to that time turned out to be wrong. Regardless of how many original UK pressings of Abbey Road we might have cleaned and played, we would never have found one that sounds as good as this pressing does, simply because none of the originals ever came close to winning a shootout, and it’s very unlikely that one ever would.

An exceptional copy of The Beatles’ last and arguably greatest album with THE BEST SIDE TWO WE HAVE EVER HEARD — QUADRUPLE PLUS (A++++)!

If you’ve heard the disastrous new pressing, then you know how important it is to play a real, vintage, analog pressing. A copy this good might just give you a new appreciation for one of the Greatest Rock Albums of All Time.  A permanent member of the Better Records Top 100, and a Desert Island Disc if ever there was one.

Abbey Road checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records. Here are three for starters:

The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as these.

Abbey Road is the very definition of a big speaker album. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is one of the The Beatles’ many audio challenges that await you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic power, don’t expect to hear them the way the band, Geoff Emerick, George Martin and everyone else involved in the production wanted you to.

It’s clear that The Beatles albums informed not only my taste in music, but the actual stereo I play that music on. It’s what progress in audio is all about. I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for close to five decades, precisely in order to play demanding recordings such as Abbey Road, an album I fell in love with “all those years ago.”

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Sgt. Pepper’s and Mistaken Audiophile Thinking (Hint: the UHQR Is Wrong)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

This commentary was probably written between 2005 when we did our first shootout for the album and 2008, by which time it would have been a regular feature on the site. 

We charge hundreds of dollars for a Hot Stamper Sgt. Pepper, which is a lot to pay for a record. But consider this: the UHQR typically sells for a great deal more than the price we charge and doesn’t sound remotely as good. 

Of course the people that buy UHQRs would never find themselves in a position to recognize how much better one of our Hot Stampers sounds in a head to head shootout with their precious and oh-so-collectible UHQR.

They assume that they’ve already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and see no reason to try another.

I was guilty of the same mistaken audiophile thinking myself in 1982. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper and thinking how amazing it sounded and how lucky I was to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now it most likely would be positively painful. All I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice), and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard really good copies of Sgt. Pepper, like the wonderful Hot Stampers we put on the site from time to time, now the MoFi UHQR sounds so phony to me that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

UPDATE 2025

If you are still buying these 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 lacking on 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.

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go to our Half-Speed mastering main page .

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It’s the Rare Yellow Submarine that Sounds Anything Like This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Here is how we described our best copy of Yellow Submarine from the last shootout:

Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage UK copy could not be beat.

Without a doubt the hardest single side of any Beatles album to find with good sound is side two of Yellow Submarine, and here’s a copy that is as good as it gets.

The only place to find the all-time classic “Hey Bulldog,” as well as “All Together Now” and “It’s All Too Much.” In addition, “All You Need Is Love” debuted in a true stereo mix on this album.

My favorite lines from the notes for the notoriously difficult-to-get-to-sound right side two:

  • Big and clear and 3-D for this
  • Nice string texture — sweet and rich for once

You do the best you can with what you have to work with, and normally side two of this album does not give you much to work with, as most copies are thin sounding and have screechy strings.

One or two out of ten copies — and of course we are only talking about the real vintage UK pressings, nothing else is worth bothering with — will get the strings right on side two. That makes side two a good test for string tone in our book, especially for those of you who don’t have any of our Hot Stamper orchestral pressings.

This is a very difficult album to find good sound for; many pressings are almost unbearably gritty and harsh. Fortunately, these two sides have no such problems. The overall tonality is rich and full-bodied, and there’s plenty of presence and energy as well.

A Tough Title to Play

Side two of this recording, the orchestral side, ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

It took us a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be, involving many of the revolutionary changes in audio we discuss at great length on the blog.

As we’ve said before about these kinds of recordings, they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees. If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the home audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles neglect).

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Harry Moss Cut These UK Stampers for Hey Jude – How Did He Go So Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Now with a couple of shootouts for both Hey Jude and the 1967-1970 compilation album under our belts, our main listening guy thinks the versions of the overlapping songs on Hey Jude are a little more fun.

He said that, all things being equal, the best pressings of Hey Jude might be a little more exciting while the best pressings of The Blue Album are a little more polite.

Here is how we described a recent shootout winning copy:

An amazing 10-song compilation from 1970 of some of the band’s biggest and best hits – “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Paperback Writer,” “Lady Madonna,” and the iconic title track among them.

Longtime customers know that we had never been able to offer this title up until 2022 – it took us twenty years to figure out what the right pressings are, and believe me, we had to go through a lot of crap to find them.

If you know the album at all, you know how bad it sounds on the average copy, and my guess is you just gave up on the idea of finding good sound for these songs, which is more or less the way we felt too, but we finally found what we were looking for, and here it is.

However, some stampers are disappointing as you can see from this section of the stamper sheet we compiled for the shootout.

Harry T. Moss, the man with the initials HTM you see above, is the Parlophone/Apple engineer who cut many of the greatest sounding Beatles albums ever made (and plenty of not-so-great sounding ones, which is why you either need to do your own shootouts or have us do them for you).

Seems at though at least some of the work he did for the Hey Jude album is not his best. We awarded both sides a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+, which means the sound is passable at best, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning it would probably not even earn that one plus.)

We do not sell records with 1+ grades; you can find those on your own. The world is full of them.

Our notes for this pressing read:

  • Too midrangey and compressed
  • Heavy tape or tube saturation, side two especially

Your only other option for hearing some of this music with top quality sound is on the 1967-1970 compilation album, the Hot Stamper pressings of which have only recently been discovered.

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Letter of the Week – “I did a lot of research on which pressing to purchase and nobody ever mentioned the version that you sell!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

One our good customers wrote to tell us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Abbey Road.

Hi Tom,

Tonight’s been really cool.

I got to hear Abbey Road in such a way that I had no idea existed. I put side one of the SHS I just got and my eyes popped out and my jaw dropped and I went ‘WTF’ was that.

Some of the extended bass rumbles on Come Together really made me smile and go ‘whoa.’

I know what my UK 1st pressing sounds like and I always thought that it was special in comparison to others l’d heard, like the MFSL and Japanese Pro Use.

So now I’m listening to yours somewhat in disbelief. The end of side one just about blew the windows out of the house! Then I put my UK copy on. By comparison, it just sounded flat… but on its own it sounds good.

What an amazing discovery. You are completely correct in your assessment of these ’69 UK pressings.

Thanks again,
Michel

P.S.

Over the last couple of years I did what I thought was a lot of research on which Abbey Road pressing to purchase for the best experience… and nobody ever mentioned the version that you sell.

Michel,

This letter warms our hearts. We’ve known that the original Abbey Road pressings are not the end-all and be-all that some audiophiles and record collectors think they are, and of course the same is true for the legendary Toshiba Pro-Use and MFSL discs.

Been there, done that, left them in the dust a long time ago. Now you know why. You own the pressing that trounces them all.

The fact that no one recommends the pressings we sell as superior to those commonly touted by the so-called experts just confirms that the work we do is difficult and simply cannot be accomplished without a staff and a budget, which, of course, no one in the audiophile or record collecting world has — staff or budget — besides us.

And that what we do is important. Essential even.

As we are the only operation dedicated to this kind of work, with either the staff or the budget it takes to succeed, it is not surprising that no one has figured out the key to Abbey Road. It took us a very long time too. As you may have read elsewhere on the blog:

Skeptical thinking has been key to our success from the very start, and it can be key to your success too. To understand records, you need to think about them critically, not naively, in order to get very far in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves.

Our first big shootout was 2007, and since then we have carried out at least two dozen more for the album, making a lot of Beatles’ fans happy in the process. We helped them spend their money on something that will give them lifelong pleasure.

As for the original sounding flat, you may have seen this too:

Shootouts are the only way to answer the most important question in all of audio: “compared to what?”

Without shootouts, how can you begin to know what are the strengths and weaknesses of the copies you own?

Now that you have done your own shootout, you know how flat your copy was all along — but, as you say, “on its own it sounds good.”

This is the kind of progress in audio we love to hear about.

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More Customers Write Us About Our Amazing Pressings of Sgt. Pepper

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

Below you will find some of the letters customers have sent us after hering one of our Hot Stamper reissue pressings of Sgt. Pepper. (More letters for the album can be found here.)

The Beatles are the only group to have their own page on the blog. No surprise there. We’ve written more about their music and sold more of their albums than we have for any other band.

Letter of the Week – “…you sell a product that is singular and unique. And completely worth every penny.”

Letter of the Week – “To this day, he refers to the wondrous sound he heard that night every time we get together.”


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Letter of the Week – “…this copy blows the sonics of my old press away.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I’ve been meaning to write to thank you for the magic you and your team create. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but it is mindblowing to hear the music that comes from even just Hot and Supers. I still haven’t crossed the Rubicon into Whites. 

I have been lucky enough to have vintage pressings passed down to me from family. And while I started hearing the difference as soon as I started cleaning those old presses vs. new “remastered” ones, this small sample from your team is incredible!

Abbey at Hot is incredible! Frankly I admired the album, now it’s one of my favorites! I’m not even a huge Beatles guy, haha (Thanks for that!)

Purple Rain at Super knocked out the vintage and remastered copies that I own.

Zep I is terrific. (Weirdly on my system, “Good Times” is the least mindblowing, but “Dazed” and all of Side 2 is crazy!)

Perhaps the best sounding so far is “Ziggy,” like you said. I own a pristine vintage press passed down and this copy I got from you blows the sonics of my old press away.

Anyway, thanks again! (more…)

Apparently, “…no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

A letter and some commentary about Revolver in mono follows the comment that was left by a Mr. Doodah defending The Beatles in mono. My reply then follows.

First up, Mr. Doodah.

“you have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. That’s exactly the point why the mono sounds good because no one is sitting in a perfect stereo field listening to music these days.

“They are either listening on Headphones or undoubtedly hundreds of degrees off access in another room or whatever they’re doing in their car or whatever so the stereo mixes will not stand up under those kinds of conditions.

“It’s only for nuts, so it’s like you sit down with a supposedly perfect acoustically design [sic] room and perfectly aligned speakers. Not exactly real world for the masses.

“I always tell people I teach engineering to… First thing… And learn how to do a great mono mix. Then you can start with all the fakery.

“You are way out of your league even pretending to know what you’re talking about”

Dear Mr. Doodah,

I would think that anyone reading this blog would see that we are not the least bit concerned with anything the masses are up to.

The masses seem to like streaming. Why should anyone waste his time taking what they like seriously? I suppose if you’re teaching those looking for work in an industry providing music to the masses, what you are telling them may be of some value.

It is surely of no value to those of us who aspire to high quality sound. Yes, the experience we are after does indeed require special rooms and speakers and, most especially, high quality stereo records to play.

If you’ve never heard The Beatles’s music reproduced at the highest levels on a big system in a dedicated room, why would you pretend to know anything about it?

Our customers can easily access the mono mixes and the modern digital releases. They have chosen instead to spend a great deal of money on our vintage records. The abundant evidence — sales figures, letters, etc. — should make it clear that our stereo Hot Stamper pressings do in fact deliver the superior sound we promised them.

Hondas and Ferraris

Some people drive Hondas and some people drive Ferraris. You can try telling people who drive a Ferrari that nobody needs such a car in this day and age, that they should get real and just switch to a Honda, but do you really think Ferrari drivers care what other people are driving in this day and age?

We have nothing against people who choose to listen to The Beatles’ music with the lowest possible fidelity imaginable. I grew up doing exactly that, hearing them for the first time in 1964, in mono, on an AM car radio. That low-fidelity mono sound worked for me and millions of others. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the very year I became a lifelong fan.

Perhaps this is the kind of sound you are teaching your students to strive for. I certainly hope not.

Some of us have moved on from car radios and mono mixes. With all the latest playback technology, and the right stereo pressings, The Beatles’ recordings, more so than for those of any other band, can now come alive in ways unimaginable to my younger self.

I hope your students get the chance someday to hear The Beatles’ music in all its glory, on a truly high-fidelity system, in stereo.

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Listening in Depth to Abbey Road

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Abbey Road.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

For all you record collectors out there, please note that no pressing from 1969 (and even for a number of years after) has ever won a shootout.

If you have an Apple UK first pressing and you think it would be hard to beat, we would love to send you one that sounds better than yours, if you can justify the kind of bread we charge for the privilege of owning a musical Masterpiece such as this.

This is the final statement from The Beatles. To take away the power of their magnum opus by playing it through inadequate equipment makes a mockery of the monumental effort that went into it. Remember, the original title for the album was Everest. That should tell you something about the size and scope of the music and sound that the Beatles had in mind. More letters, reviews and commentaries for Abbey Road can be found here.

Side One

Come Together

This track and I Want You are both good tests for side one. They tend to be smooth, but what separates the best copies is deep, punchy bass. Without a good solid bottom end, these songs simply don’t work.

Something

When the choruses get loud on this song, most copies will be aggressive. You’ll want to turn down the volume. With Hot Stampers, the louder the better. The sound stays smooth and sweet.

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

Probably the toughest test on side one. The loud banging on the anvil can be pretty unpleasant if you don’t have a well-mastered pressing.

Also, this track has a tendency to be a bit lean and upper midrangey on even the best copies.

Oh! Darling
Octopus’s Garden
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

Listen to Paul’s bass on this track. When you have a good copy and the bass notes are clearly defined, you can hear him doing all kinds of interesting things throughout the song. I remember playing the MoFi not long ago and noticing how that pressing’s lack of bass definition robbed Paul of his contribution to so many of these songs. When the bass is blubbery, it’s difficult to follow his parts.

Side Two

Here Comes the Sun
Because

The best pressings are full of TUBEY MAGIC here — sweet and smooth, but still present and clear. There should be no trace of grain or spi on their voices if you have a good copy. This is DEMO DISC MATERIAL. If you have the system for it, you can show people the sound of the Beatles in a way few have ever heard.

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The Abbey Road Remix on Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

We got a copy of the Abbey Road remix in, cleaned it and played it. Now we can officially report the results of our investigation into this modern marvel. Imagine, The Beatles with a new mix! Just what it needed, right?

So what did we hear?

The Half-Speed mastered remixed Abbey Road has to be one of the worst sounding Beatles records we have ever had the misfortune to play.

Hard to imagine you could make Abbey Road sound any worse. It’s absolutely disgraceful.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

I will be writing more about its specific shortcomings down the road, but for now let this serve as a warning that you are throwing your money away if you buy this newly remixed LP.

UPDATE 2022

As you may have guessed by now, I have completely lost interest in detailing the abundant shortcomings of this awful record. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy one.

If you did buy one, do yourself a different favor: order any UK pressing from 1970-1986 off the web and play that one head to head with it so you can hear how badly they screwed with and screwed up the new mix.

When the remastering is this incompetent, you do not need a Hot Stamper pressing to beat it. Almost any record will do.

Remastering a well-known title and creating a new sound for it is a huge bête noire for us here at Better Records.

Half-Speed mastered disasters that sound as bad as this record does go directly into our audiophile record hall of shame.

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope. If they target their resources (time and money) well, there is no reason they can’t get to where they need to be, the same way we did. Our audio advice section may be of help in that regard.

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