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.

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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A Simple Listening Test Makes It Easy to Judge Pressings of Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 2446, as well as the Analogue Productions version from 2013 (the original 33 is the only one I have played, mastered by Ryan Smith at Sterling), are, for many reasons, both disasters, but they do have one specific failing that we had no trouble recognizing.

We feel both pressings are worth further discussion and analysis because they both provide an easy test that can show you, dear reader, how wrong they are in one easily identifiable respect.

When reading the commentary below, keep in mind that what is bad about the Classic Records reissue from 1995 is precisely what is bad about the Analogue Productions remaster put out many years later.

As I noted for some of the Classic Heifetz titles a while back, for all I know the CDs for his Living Stereo recordings may have better sound. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s rather poor track record regarding the remastering of his music.

Case in point: The Living Stereo CDs I own (both the CD and the SACD) of Scheherazade are dramatically better than the awful Classic Records pressing of it.

Audiophiles who don’t notice what is wrong with the Classic pressing need to get hold of a nice RCA White Dog pressing to see just how poorly the Classic stacks up. (They could even find one that’s not so nice and listen through the surface noise. The difference would still be obvious.)

UPDATE 2025

It has been many years since a White Dog pressing won a shootout. In our last listing for a Hot Stamper White Dog pressing in 2024, we noted:

Now that we know which stampers have the potential to win our shootouts, the right Shaded Dog originals have lately been coming out on top, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good, just not as good.

No White Dog earned a higher grade than 2+, and none of the three WD pressings we had on hand earned 2+ on both sides.

Our notes for the various sides of the WD pressings read: “a bit brash, sometimes squawky, dry and bright,” and the like.

Those of you looking for the best sound should stick to the Shaded Dog label originals. They are rich and lush in a way that the WD reissues in our experience never are. I used to swear by the WD reissues, but I see now how wrong I was. My judgments were colored by a darker, less revealing stereo than the one we use now, and that makes all the difference in the world.

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The Warm Moods – The Reissue Is So Good, How Can the Original Be Better?

Hot Stamper Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Our review from years ago for the Discovery reissue of The Warm Moods can be found below.

We loved the sound, so much so that we found it hard to fault.

Imagine our surprise when we discoverd that that the original was clearly better.

Much better. At least a full grade better.

When we did the shootout again, a rare (in stereo anyway) original Reprise showed us just how wrong we were.

The best original pressing we found took the sound of The Warm Moods to another level, and a pretty high one at that.

It’s yet another example in which the most important question in all of audio had been overlooked: compared to what?

Who knew the recording could sound any better than the wonderful Discovery pressing we’d played?

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Beware of Fooling Yourself with Pseudo Shootouts

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

We encourage any audiophile who wants to improve the quality of his record collection to start doing his own shootouts.

Freeing up an afternoon to sit down with a pile of cleaned copies of a favorite LP (you won’t make it through any other kind) and playing them one after another is by far the best way to learn about records and their mysterious pressing variations.

Be sure to take extensive notes.

Shootouts are a great deal of work if you do them right.

If you have just a few pressings on hand and don’t bother to clean them carefully, or follow rigorous testing protocols, that kind of shootout anyone can do. We would not consider that a real shootout.

Art Dudley illustrates this approach, but you could pick any reviewer you like — none of them have ever undertaken a shootout worthy of the name to our knowledge.

With only a few records to play – a woefully inadequate sample size — you probably won’t learn much of value and, worse, you are unlikely to find a top copy, although you may be tempted to convince yourself that you have.

Further Reading

Tell Us More About “Hot Stampers”

More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions

Many of the basic questions concerning Hot Stampers, including our grading system, 2-packs, coupons, the mailing list, as well as more general ordering and payment information, can be found in our FAQ on our website.

The links below deal specifically with the kinds of issues that potential customers, as well as skeptics and forum posters (god bless ’em!) have raised with us over the years.

We think sitting down to play a Hot Stamper pressing is the best way to appreciate its superior sound, in the same way that hearing a vintage LP played back on a top quality audio system is the best way to appreciate the superiority of analog.

If you want to skip all that and just buy a record or two in order to hear what you’ve been missing, click here.

To expand on the basics discussed above, you might want to check out some of these next:

  1. How can I find my own Hot Stamper pressings?
  2. Do I already have some Hot Stamper pressings in my collection?

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An Extraordinary Recording of the Beethoven Septet – This Is Why You Must Do Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music ofBeethoven Available Now

My first note on side one is “HTF” — Hard To Fault, for the sound was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments which are 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.

If you like Heavy Vinyl, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl can sound fine. It’s only when you have something better that its faults come into focus. (We, of course, have something much, much better, and we like to call them Hot Stampers!)

Side One

A++, so good, yet in comparison to side two we realized that it was not as present, spacious and transparent as it SEEMED.

Side Two

A+++, White Hot!

Ah, here was the sound we didn’t know we were missing. So big and open, with space for every player, each clearly laid out across the stage. This is Hi-Fi at its best.

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