Doing Shootouts

If you would like to acquire better sounding pressings, please consideer taking our advice for conducting your own record shootouts, the only reliable way we know of to find them.

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.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

It may be a lot of work, but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never contended it was. From the start we’ve explained how to go about finding Hot Stampers for yourself. If you follow our lead, the quality of your collection is almost certain to improve.

Frames of Reference, Carefully Conducted Shootouts and Critical Listening

Hot Stamper Pressings of Decca Recordings Available Now

The sound we were hearing on this pressing of the Beethoven Septet (CS 6132) during a recent shootout was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments heard in the work.

The legendary 1959 Decca tree microphone setup had worked its magic once again.

And, as good as it was, we were surprised to discover that side two was actually even better!

The sound was more spacious and more transparent. We asked ourselves, how is this even possible?

Hard to believe, but side two had the sound that was TRULY hard to fault.

This is precisely what careful shootouts and critical listening are all about.

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?

The vast majority of our Shootout Winning pressings fall short in one way or another on one side, something we have lately been making more of an effort to highlight on the blog.

Now, if you are a fan in general of modern Heavy Vinyl pressings, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings of those same titles could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl might sound fine.

It’s only when you have something better to play that its faults come into clearer focus.

And if you have any of these titles and they sound fine to you, this is a situation that requires your immediate attention!

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You Say You Want a Revelation? Well, You Know…

Record Collecting for Audiophiles – A Guide to the Fundamentals

We get letters from time to time chiding us for charging what strikes some people as rather large amounts of money for records that we would be the first to admit do not have much in the way of Collector Value, the assumption being that collectible records are of course worth the high prices they command in the marketplace, if for no other reason than that their prices are set by the market.

The writers of these letters are convinced that our Hot Stamper pressings, for some reason or another, are a very different animal. They simply can’t be worth the seemingly outrageous prices we ask for them.

Let’s be honest: if you don’t like our prices, you have plenty of other sources for the records we sell. And it’s unlikely that anyone would charge as much as we charge for what appears to be the same pressing, although it does happen.

(The phrase “appears to be” in the sentence above is at the heart of our business model. It is also foundational to much of what you need to know in order to collect better sounding records. The 6000 entries on this blog are dedicated to helping you understand everything that follows from that premise.)

Customer Satisfaction Is Everything to Us

Some of our customers seem to be inordinately pleased with their purchases. We know that because they’ve told us so.

  • One of our customers paid $700 for a copy of Aja and — mirabile dictu — he’s actually glad he did.
  • Another customer wrote to tell us how much he liked the copy of Let It Be we sent him:

“I would have paid $15,000 for this feeling had I known it was there.”

  • Was our Hot Stamper pressing of Deja Vu a bargain at $800? This customer thought it was.

Revelatory Sound Quality Can Be Yours

Some of our customers have found the sound of our Hot Stamper pressings to be nothing less than a revelation, especially the customers who’ve taken the time to compare them to the Heavy Vinyl or Half-Speed mastered pressings of the same titles they owned.

This prompted some of them to swear off the modern masterings they used to like. This, as you can imagine, warmed our hearts no end.

Our How-To Guide Is Free

If you want to do the work yourself and avoid the cost of buying our Hot Stamper pressings, we are behind you all the way.

We even tell you how to go about it.

You can buy records from us, or you can learn to do your own shootouts.

The one thing you can’t do is buy a ready-made superior sounding remastered copy of anything, no matter what anyone may tell you.

After 36 years in the audiophile record business, having conducted thousands upon thousands of Hot Stamper shootouts — using the process which allowed us to discover the best sounding pressings of countless titles in every genre of music — we can tell you with confidence that records don’t work that way.

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How Wide and Tall Is Your Copy of Little Queen? Compared to What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Heart Available Now

Little Queen is yet another recording that only truly comes alive when you turn up your volume.

On the right system, this is a classic rock Demo Disc to beat practically anything you could ever throw at it.

Love Alive and Barracuda on this copy will deliver the full rock and roll power your system is capable of.

If you’ve got The Big Sound, this is the record that will show you just how big it is.

You get huge meaty guitars, big bass, a smooth top end, full-bodied vocals, powerful rock energy and dynamics, loads of richness and incredible transparency.

Wide and Tall

A key quality we look for in Hot Stamper copies of Little Queen is wide and tall presentation.

What exactly does that mean you ask? The best copies, the ones that really jump out of the speakers, tend to present some (usually high frequency) information higher and more forward than others. This is not hard to miss.

When you’re playing ten or fifteen copies of the same side of the same album and suddenly a cymbal crashes higher and more clearly than the others did in the part of the track you are testing, you can’t help but notice it. Wow! How did that get there?

Once you hear it you start to listen for it, and sure enough the next copy won’t do it, nor will the next. Maybe the one after that gets about halfway there: the cymbal crashes are higher than most, but not as high as the one that really showed you how high is up.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Progress in Audio

And of course it all ties in with our revolutionary changes in audio commentary. If you’ve been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, maybe ALL the Little Queen pressings do it now. They might ALL do something they never did before, and in fact they SHOULD be doing most things better now. 

Our last shootout was a while back. Since then many, many parts of the chain have undergone improvement. During this shootout we heard things in the recording we’d never heard before. This is the point of all this audio fooling around. It pays off, if you do it right. You have musical information waiting to be unlocked in your favorite recordings. It isn’t going to free itself. You have to do the work to set it free. Do it our way or do it some other way, but do it. You, more than anyone else, will be the one to get the benefit.

Problems Noted More Recently

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We Was Wrong about Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Albums Available Now

My history with Led Zeppelin’s seventh album is a classic case of me mistakenly blaming the recording.

In our listings for Presence from about fifteen years ago (a lifetime in audio, at least for us) we noted:

“By the way, Royal Orleans (at the end of side one) never sounds good; it’s always grainy. Same story with the intro to Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It sounds like groove damage, but since it’s on every last one of our domestic copies (the only ones that have the potential to sound amazing in our experience) we know it has to be a pressing problem and not a problem with the individual copies. It’s a shame, but the rest of the songs here all sound amazing.”

This is no longer true, or at least the part about Nobody’s Fault But Mine being grainy or distorted isn’t, since I didn’t test Royal Orleans this time around.

I had just put in a fresh Dynavector 17d3 two days before and spent almost three hours getting the setup dialed in. In fact, it was so right when I was done that I spent the next three or four hours experimenting with room treatments.

When I was done the changes seemed to have opened up the sound and increased the transparency even further. (I went a little too far and had to dial it back a bit, but that’s not at all unusual in my experience.)

Wait a Minute

So now I’m reading about the problems we used to encounter with Nobody’s Fault and thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. I didn’t hear any grain or distortion. Not on the good copies anyway.”

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard those problems is that over the last year or so we’d fixed them.

How I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better.

Or maybe it was that in combination with a few new room tweaks.

Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know.

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The Reissues Consistently Beat the Originals on this Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Records Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings on the plum label are the way to go, right? 

In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

The notes for the FR original pressings we played read:

  • Less spacious, more bright and flat.

They’re not bad sounding, they’re just not as good sounding as the RFR reissues, which, incidentally, won the shootout.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but we make it a point to never give out the stamper information for our shootout winners, as finding those very special pressings has been the work of a lifetime and is certainly not something that should be given away for free.

Rules of Thumb

It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.

Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.

Who Knew?

Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?

Certainly not us, not until we had done the shootout.

The difference between the way we do things and the way others do them boils down to this: We assumed that the original could be the best, and then we tested that assumption and found out we were wrong.

But the right reissues of this Mercury — again not the ones you see pictured — is indeed an exceptionally good sounding record.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, assuming that owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

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The Four Pillars of Success

What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many copies of the same album as you can get your hands on.

There are basically four steps in this process. In order to discover your own Hot Stampers, you must take great pains with all four if you are going to find success in evaluating the pressings you’ve found.

We discuss each and every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this very site. Although none of it will come as news to those of you who spend much of their time on this blog, our commentary here is simply lays out the basic formula for the process. 

If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly than most audiophiles and record collectors think is necessary.

The Four Cornerstones of Hot Stampers

The work required to find Hot Stamper pressings comprises these four steps.

  1. You must have a sufficient number of copies to play in order to find at least one “hot” one.
  2. You must be able to clean your copies properly in order to get them to sound their best.
  3. You must be able to reproduce your copies faithfully.
  4. You must be able to evaluate them critically.

How It Used to Be

It’s an open question whether before, say, 2010 we could have done shootouts for many of the albums you’ve seen come to the site since then. Frankly, I have my doubts.

But the good news in audio is that things change. It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad now sound pretty darn good. The site is full of commentaries about them. Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper Revolution is all about.

You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and consider the case closed. You did the right thing, you played by the rules, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, all that kind of stuff. Cross that title off and move on to the next.

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Heretics and True Believers Clash on the Battlefield in Cyberspace, Part Two

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

Part one of this conversation can be found here. [Some bolding and such added.]

Hi, Tom,

Are there other great sounding stereos out there? I’m sure there are. Just as there are great sounding records still to be found out in the wild.

But, the stereo I’ve built by rapidly copying what you did painstakingly over decades is giving me better sound from recorded music than I’ve encountered almost anywhere else, including on far more expensive systems. It’s also more honest, direct, and revealing than stereos usually are.

First, I trusted you on records, and you were right. Then, I trusted you on stereos, and you were right again.

As for how people can find great sounding records. I expressed three pieces of the advice I’ve come to realize are true. All controversial enough, apparently, to get a thread shut down.

First, they can buy records from you.

If they don’t yield sound commensurate with price, just return the darned thing. A couple Better Records a year will probably build somebody a better-sounding vinyl collection than the same amount of money dumped in a shop or on Discogs. Tom, I have never encountered a disappointed *customer* of yours.

Second, don’t ascribe to hard and fast rules.

No, it is not true that all records from a given pressing house or mastering engineer are the definitive versions. There are better-sounding copies sitting in bins at used shops. Not all of them, but some, and they are often cheaper. This is a reality that is hard to find online, because it turns out it is hard to state it online.

Third, if you want to find great-sounding records on your own, plan to buy lots of copies of a particular title.

Avoid original pressings – those are not guaranteed to sound better, and they come at a premium.

[I take issue with this idea, see below.]

Play them all, pick your favorite (one, in my experience, is likely to stand out). Then, hope that your local shop takes returns, or that you are able to unload them on Discogs. Might somebody save themselves some money doing it this way, compared to buying a record from you? Maybe? But then, if they decide to “check their work” by buying a record from you, yours is going to sound better.

When I offered this advice on that forum, I got told I was wrong. Instead, those guys have a formula that works for them. I’d say it’s a formula for ending up with Pretty Good Records. First, you search the forums to find the deadwax for a copy that somebody has commented is THE one to have.

They usually don’t mention what type of equipment they have, or how many other copies of that record they’ve heard, or even what in particular about it sounds good. For me, going after pressings recommended online has never been a reliable way to find a great-sounding record.

And, when I get a Better Record, I check to see if it is a stamper that’s already known to sound good. Almost always, there’s no mention of it anywhere. Second piece of accepted wisdom on the forums: NM always sounds better than VG+. Here’s something I said that seemed to really piss people off: Good-sounding records got played a lot. Somebody really took me to task for suggesting that I had purchased from you a copy of a record I love that would probably grade VG+ based on the appearance of its surfaces, but that was delivering sound so good, I had zero desire to hunt for another copy, even the same deadwax in NM condition. Sure, I’d buy it if I ever came across it, but I would not expect it to sound better than the copy I already had. So, even among a group of seasoned vinyl listeners that understand certain truths they still seem to live by certain principles in collecting records that simply do not work consistently.

I’ve spent a lot of time blaming myself for the money and time I wasted on pretty-good records, played on a pretty-good stereo. I trusted the magazines and the salesmen. I don’t think they were being disingenuous; I just think they didn’t know any better. I trusted the splashy websites, the satisfied customer reviews, the youtube gushes, and the forum posters. This many people can’t all be wrong. They must know what they are talking about. And, I wasn’t hearing any other information.

Now I know why I wasn’t hearing any countervailing views – they get deleted. For somebody who wants to attain better sound, there’s your shop, and more importantly, your blog. I know the vast majority of people who come across either of these will dismiss them outright. Their loss. A few will return, and be better off for it – even, financially.

The most painful accusation I encountered on the forum was that I am doing people a disservice by leading them to spend their money and not get anything in return. It hurt to read that. Of course, I would never want to do that. To anybody who becomes your customer because I said they should give it a try, I’d give them the same advice you gave me early on: Take it slow. Once you discover how good these records can sound, there’s a real urge to start snapping them up. Instead, just take it slow. Enjoy each one. Better Records isn’t going anywhere.

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A Short Primer for Some of the Qualities We’re Listening For

Record Shootouts Are Tricky – Here Are Some of the Lessons We’ve Learned

For our last Hot Stamper pressing of Shepherd Moons, we noted:

This may not be our favorite music in the world, but it’s hard to argue with sound as good as this.

We went on to add:

The sound here is airy, open, spacious, and transparent, as well as tonally correct, clear and present.

Those are the qualities of our shootout winning pressings that we found to be the most compelling.

But is that everything we were listening for? Of course not.

So precisely what are the criteria by which a record like Shepard Moons should be judged?

Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings:

  • energy,
  • vocal presence,
  • frequency extension (on both ends),
  • transparency,
  • harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key),
  • rhythmic drive,
  • tonal correctness,
  • fullness,
  • size,
  • space, and
  • Tubey Magic.

When we can get all, or almost all, of the qualities above to come together on any given side, we provisionally award it a grade of “contender.”

Once we’ve been through all our copies on one side, we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side.

Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides matched up.

It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself. We guarantee you have never heard this music — really, any music — sound better than it does on one of our Hot Stamper pressings, or your money back.

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Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions about shootouts.

I answered most of them in Part One of this commentary. Here are the questions he posed that remain to be answered.

[I]f you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [the best stampers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

First Question

If I may paraphrase, you’re asking, “do the right stampers always get good grades?”

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Learning the Record, Any Record

More of the Music of the Traveling Wilburys

Many of the pressings we played of Volume One suffered from too much compression and a phony hi-fi-ish quality on the vocals. We knew there had to be better sounding copies out there somewhere, so we kept dropping the needle on every pressing we could get our hands on until we found one. Here is how we described a killer copy we ran into during that process.

We heard a lot of copies with a spitty, gritty top end, but this one is smooth like butter.

Side two is nearly as good but doesn’t have quiet the same energy factor. It’s still dramatically better than most copies out there.

Now that we’ve discovered these Hot Stampers, the sound is finally where we want it to be. Until this week, we were convinced that these songs sounded better on the radio. (That’s what tons of compression and FM bass boost will do for you.)

Learning the Record

For our recent shootout we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought would have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

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