Live and Learn

Here we discuss the records we think we got, uh, wrong.

It’s not really a problem for us though. We feel no need to cover up our mistakes. Recognizing and correcting previous errors is how we’ve managed to learn so much about records that no one else seems to know.

Gaining knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is always slow, incremental and riddled with errors and bad judgments.

A common misperception among those visiting the site is that we think we know it all. Nothing could be further from the truth. We learn something new about records with practically every shootout.

By playing the records grouped here, under rigorously controlled conditions, on top quality equipment, we found out just how much better or worse they are than are we thought.

Alan Sides Sure Likes a Dead Studio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Pablo Recordings Available Now

Many of Allen Sides‘ recordings suffer from a lack of ambience. The musicians do not seem to have much room around them. In audiophile parlance, his recordings often lack “air.”  I can’t say all his recordings are made in a dead studio, but some of them sure are.

Many audiophile recordings, especially direct-to-disc recordings from the ’70s, are insufferable in this respect, with too much multi-miking and not enough studio space.

This Bach recording on Crystal Clear is a good example of the sound some audiophile labels were going for. Back in the 70s, audiophile producers and engineers were using state-of-the-art high-tech recording equipment, but they seemed to lack experience as well as knowledge of the recordings of the past. They regularly ended up producing records that are not remotely the equal of those that were commonly made only twenty years before.

For Duke is the poster boy for that sound. The instruments are dynamic as all get out, but no one ever imagined that the ideal approach to recording Ellington’s music would be to cram a big group of players into the equivalent of a heavily carpeted and draped livingroom.

Miller and Kreisel created a completely new, strange and inappropriate sound for Duke’s music, and it has been rubbing me the wrong way since I first heard it demoed in the audio showrooms I frequented back in the 70s.

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Wes Montgomery – The Alternative Wes Montgomery (Revisited)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wes Montgomery Available Now

UPDATE 2025:

Many years ago, back in our pre-shootout days, we played a copy of this album and liked what we’d heard.

We just got another copy in and thought the sound was not worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.

We judge it to have middling sound quality.

If you see one for cheap, pick it up, but don’t expect the sound to be anything special.

Our Old Review

This Milestone Two-Fer LP with EXCELLENT sound has 14 unreleased alternate versions of songs recorded in a variety of settings by guitarist Wes Montgomery during his period with Riverside. In many cases, the versions here are dramatically different from the versions that appear on his original albums. 

Producer Orrin Keepnews, who assembled this collection, notes, “With an artist who insisted on several takes, and the obvious need to eventually pick only one for release, we had to make some rather arbitrary, borderline decisions that at the time seemed to have doomed some excellent music to oblivion.”

This set helps to rescue some of that excellent music. The tracks feature Montgomery playing with notable musicians such as include Milt Jackson, Wynton Kelly, Kenny Burrell, Philly Joe Jones and Victor Feldman.

On compilations of unreleased material such as this, the master tapes are used to make the record. There’s no need for a copy tape to have ever been made.

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The True Test for Side Two (and How Wrong We Were about Domestic Pressings) of Backless

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

During our shootout we discovered that the true test for side two was the second track, the old blues song Early In The Morning.

It’s by far the best sounding track on the album, with huge space, rich bass, a fat snare and Tubey Magic to die for. This is the kind of sound that the likes of Glyn Johns gets down on tape, live in the studio no doubt, and it made it easy to do the shootout for side two.

The bigger, the richer, the tubier, the more transparent the better. It’s THE track to demo with. 

Both sides have rich, smooth, clear sound. Listen for the guitars on the first track on side one; the grungier the better. Punchy bass too.

Turn It Up and Let It Rock

The typical pressing of Backless, much like the typical pressing of Slowhand, is just too thick, dull, compressed and veiled to be much fun.

At the very least you need to turn this album up good and loud to get it to do anything.

The copies that are solid and weighty love getting loud; the copies that are thin and bright only get worse as the level goes up, a sign that they leave a lot to be desired. This is a rock album after all.

We Was Wrong

We used to note the following regarding the country that produced the best sounding pressings:

We had top quality copies on both domestic and British vinyl. Both were cut here in L.A.. It makes sense that either can be good.

This should have been corrected a long time ago, as far back as 2017, perhaps earlier. The domestic copies, thought cut at The Mastering Lab, are not competitive with the British LPs also cut there and then sent to England for pressing.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

We may have liked the domestic pressings a long time ago, but with changes to the system and many shootouts under our belts, the sonic superiority of the Brits cannot be denied.

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We Was Wrong about Saxophone Colossus and More in 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

The album is a compilation of three major sessions from 1956, all with both Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Allmusic describes it this way:

“Saxophone Colossus, the album that really made the jazz public fully aware of the majestic talents of Sonny Rollins, is combined here with seven other great performances from the same highly creative period in the long career of this major artist.”

In 2010 we thought this two-fer had very good sound for the music it contained. Here is what we had to say all those years ago:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP has FOUR GREAT SIDES with each rating an A+ or better. The standout sides here are two and four, both rating an A++. Both sides are EXCELLENT and very lively with lots of energy and presence. Side one rates an A+ and has a wonderfully extended top end and side three rates an A+ – A++ with clean and clear sound and huge breathy horns.

Well, it turns out that in 2010 we had a lot to learn.

We were about to do a shootout for Saxophone Colossus about five [make that ten or more] years ago, and we decided to pull out some of the two-fer pressings we had sitting in the backroom to see how they would hold up against the early pressings we liked, which you can read about here.

It did not go well. The album sounded like a cheap reissue, which of course it is, but many cheap reissues sound great, so we never hold the price of the record against it when deciding whether or not it is worth cleaning and auditioning.

There are scores of budget jazz reissues from the 70s and 80s that sound great, some of them two-fer pressings.

Just not this one. It’s passable at best, and a very far cry from what the best pressings can sound like.

More on Saxophone Colossus

Our last White Hot Stamper Gold Label Mono pressing went for big bucks, 900 of them in fact.

Of course, a clean original goes for many times that, which is one reason you have never seen such a record on our site.

How much would we have to charge for a Hot Stamper pressing of an album we paid many thousands of dollars for? Far more than our customers would be willing to pay us, that’s for sure.

You Say You Don’t Have Nine Hundred Bucks for This Album?

Try the DCC pressing from 1995.

The DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing is probably a nice record. I haven’t played it in many years, but I remember liking it back in the day.

It’s dramatically better than the 80s OJC, which, like many OJC pressings, is thin, hard, tizzy up top and devoid of Tubey Magic.

I would be surprised if the DCC Gold CD isn’t even better than their vinyl pressing.

They usually are.

Steve Hoffmann brilliantly mastered many classic albums for DCC. I like DCC’s CDs much better than their records.

Their records did not have to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discussed in some depth here.

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Honky Chateau – Two Very Different Mastering Approaches

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

Our thoughts circa 2007, about the time we found our first real breakthrough pressing.

This has to be one of the best sounding rock records of all time. The highs are silky sweet, the vocals are full-bodied and breathy, and the tonal balance is perfection from top to bottom.

If you have any doubts that Elton John was a pop music genius, just play this record. It’s all the proof you will need. Drop the needle on any track — you just can’t go wrong.

There’s no need to go on and on about the sonic qualities of this copy. Everything you’d ever want from this record is here in abundance. Folks, this copy is the epitome of what we call Master Tape Sound — on both sides.

Two mastering approaches

The original British copies of this record, with the leatherette cover, have two distinctly different mastering approaches.

The earliest pressings tend to be very lively, but a bit hi-fi-ish and aggressive in places. I used to think these were the best.

The later British originals tend to sound dull and muddy.

There was a time when we liked a certain British stamper that we thought split the difference between the mastering approaches mentioned above.

The copies we played this time around with that stamper were practically unacceptable this time around.

Our best domestic pressings actually bettered many of the Brit copies with our old favorite stamper.

Recent improvements in our stereo and evaluation process have allowed us to discover the stampers with that we think have the right sound.

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of revealing little of such information on the site, for a number of reasons we discussed in a commentary we wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the Hot Stamper revolution. (Ahem.)

However, in 2024 we decided to reverse our previous policy. We now make available to our readers a great deal of that information, under these four headings:

Please to enjoy.

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Straight Shooter’s Punchy Drums

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bad Company Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The bulk of this commentary was written in 2009 and then amended a number of time since.

In late 2009 we had just finished a shootout for this hard-rockin’ album, our first since January of ’08, and what we were hearing this time around BLEW OUR MINDS. This record got a whole lot better over the course of the last twenty months or so. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the drum sound on this record is right up there with the most present, punchy and realistic I have ever heard on record. 

I saw a friend’s band play recently in a small club and remember thinking how amazingly punchy the snare sounded (the sound coming from the live instrument itself and the club’s speakers) and this record has that kind of drum sound!

(Here are some other records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum.)

There’s nothing like live music — everybody knows that — but good copies of this album get you a whole lot closer than I ever expected to get.

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Mobile Fidelity’s Approach to Mastering – I Have a Theory

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

I have a theory about why MoFi’s mastering approach tended to work for the Waiting for Columbus album when it failed so miserably for so many others. It goes a little something like this. 

Back in their early days, MoFi tended to add bass and treble to practically every record they mastered, regardless of whether or not the master tape they were using needed a boost.

A little extra sparkle up top and a little extra kick down low was what the audiophile public seemed to want.  We call this the smile curve and lots of audiophile records have a case of it.

Truth be told, I was a member of that group and I know I did.

Fortunately for them, Waiting for Columbus is an album that can ofteny use a little at both ends. Rarely did The Mastering Lab supply it, making the original domestic pressings somewhat bass-shy and dull on the extreme top. The MoFi clearly corrected the poor EQ choices The Mastering Lab had often made. 

UPDATE 2024: Poor EQ Choices?

Or perhaps it could have been one or more of the following:

  • Perhaps the band liked it better that way.
  • Perhaps The Mastering Lab found it easier to cut that way.
  • Perhaps the cause of the records lacking extension on both ends comes from some other factors that cannot be known.

Or, if you don’t like those three, just make up some other reasons that sound plausible, or ones that fit in with other ideas you may have, even though there is probably not an iota of evidence to support any of it.

This is the way of the audiophile record collector — theories galore, but not much experimental evidence to back them up (or falsify them as the case may be). We are more inclined to the No Theory approach to finding good records, which you can read about here. We believe it has served us well and can do the same for you.

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Tchaikovsky on Classic Records and the TAS List

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

We used to like the Classic Records pressing of LSC 2241 a lot more than we do now, a case of live and learn.

Our tube system from the 90s was very different from the one we are using now.

That system was noticeably darker and by all accounts far less revealing when we had auditioned the Classic sometime in the 90s, and those two qualities did most of the heavy lifting needed to disguise its shortcomings. We mistakenly noted:

HP put the Shaded Dog pressing (the only way it comes; there is no RCA reissue to my knowledge) on his TAS List of Super Discs, and with good reason: it’s wonderful!

The rest of our commentary still holds up though:

But for some reason he also put the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl reissue on the list, and that record’s not even passable, let alone wonderful. It’s far too lean and modern sounding, and no original Living Stereo record would ever sound that way, thank goodness. 

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L.A. Woman Is a Disaster on German Heavy Vinyl, Part One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

There was a German 180 gram pressing of L.A. Woman that was so bad, I called this commentary from 2005 The Audiophile Apocalypse. [Minor edits have been made since then.]

The fact that some audiophiles and audiophile reviewers appeared to like this pressing was a sign that, to me at least, The End Is Near, or May Be. There is no hope for audiophiles if they can’t tell a good record from a bad one, and this is clearly a bad one.

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

As noted at the top, this commentary was written a long time ago. Much of our thinking about the recordings of The Doors has evolved since then, having played scores of their records in shootouts and learned something new from practically each one. Click here to read more.

Dateline: January, 2005

When I first played it I thought there must be something wrong with my stereo. There was no deep bass. (This recording has amazing deep bass.) The sound was upper midrangey and distorted. There was no extreme top at all.

This surprised me, as I had heard that this was supposed to be a good record.

What I heard coming off the copy that I was playing was pure garbage. I was confused.

So I grabbed a couple of DCC Doors pressings. The first one I played was Waiting For The Sun, my favorite on DCC. Ahh, that’s more like it. Sweet, open, plenty of bass, extended highs, Steve Hoffman’s beautifully liquid midrange — everything I expected to hear on his version was there just exactly the way it should be.

So I knew it wasn’t my stereo. Then I pulled out the DCC LA Woman. What’s the difference you ask? Well, the DCC has a top end. Listen to the cymbals. They ring sweetly and correctly. You can hear that the tape hiss sounds correct, a sure sign that the top end is accurate.

The midrange is a bit recessed compared to the German pressing. Steve says he took out a half DB in the upper mids. There’s distortion on the vocals and he was trying to soften the effect. It might have been better to leave it flat, but either way is preferable to the boosted, aggressive, edgy upper midrange to be found on the German pressing.

The German LP sounds like something playing over the radio. AM, not FM. Part of the problem is that there’s no lower midrange on the German pressing to properly balance out the vocals. Perhaps it’s not on the tape they used. I’m guessing it probably isn’t.

But any mastering engineer worthy of the name should know how to fix a problem like that. Steve did. Apparently this German fellow did not.

And worst of all, there is no deep bass on this record AT ALL. The whole lower octave is missing. Now to be fair, the DCC LP has the same problem. There’s no lower bass on it either. That’s why I don’t recommend that you listen to LA Woman on vinyl. I don’t know of any copy that sounds right.

UPDATE 2025

This was true in 2005 because we had yet to do the work it takes to find the right copies, the ones with plenty of bass and everything else too. I think it took us another ten years to find the pressings with the right stampers. Scroll to the bottom of this listing to see our notes for the copy that won our last shootout in 2024.

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The Early London Pressings Of Schubert’s 9th Are Awful

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

There are plenty of Deccas and Londons that we’ve cleaned and played over the years that were disappointing, and some of them can be found here.

What was most striking about this shootout was how poorly the original London Bluebacks (CS 6061) fared when going head to head with the best vintage reissues. In fact, they were so obviously inferior I doubt we would have even needed another pressing to know that they could not possibly be considered Hot Stampers.

The two we had were crude, flat, full of harmonic distortion, and both had clearly restricted frequency extremes.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them.

But I remember liking the Blueback pressings I played ten or twenty years ago.

Did I have better copies, or was my system not capable of showing me the shortcomings I so clearly heard this time around? Since this is a question that cannot be answered with any certainty, we’ll have to leave it there.

Our favorite performance of the work is this one with Krips and the LSO, but on a much later reissue pressing produced by Decca in the 70s. Imagine that!

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