More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Carrying out a carefully controlled shootout with a large number of cleaned pressings is precisely what teaches you what to listen for on an album.

One way to think about it is this: you can’t know what to listen for until you start listening.

If you’re playing enough of copies, and your playback quality is good enough, the records themselves will tell you what they are capable of. All you have to do is listen to what the best of them are doing.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

1. 1. First you go deep into the sound.
   2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
   3. Now, with the knowledge of what to listen for, you are in a position to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right, and you do it often enough, it has the power to change everything you will ever understand about audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes clear what they “did to it” in the mastering. Compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound, it’s obvious how far short of the mark it falls.

The critiques we write nowadays are usually quite specific about the shortcomings of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some testimonial letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are limiting yourself to buying vintage records, not remastered pressings, you are probably not wasting much of your money.

That’s because every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered more than a stopgap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally get hold of a better sounding vintage pressing in good playing condition.

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