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Brahms / Sonata in D Minor / Laredo

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND for this incredibly rare Living Stereo violin record.

This is the first Shaded Dog pressomg of LSC 2414 I’ve ever seen. Side one, the Brahms Sonata, has very good sound and is played beautifully. When I dropped the needle on side two I went “Wow!”

The Bach partita for solo violin is incredible sounding. The violin is close-miked and every nuance of the instrument is right there before you. The immediacy of the recording is nothing short of stunning.

To quote from the liner notes, “Jaime calls the Sonatas and Partitas THE most demanding works in the literature. The works lightness and high spirits — the spirit of 17th century dance music — belie its complexity and the enormous technical and interpretive demands it makes of the performer.”

Having this intimate a window onto the piece, I completely agree. It’s a spell-binding work.

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Suites for Solo Cello on the Later Label – Ouch!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2021

The discussion here is for a Oval label copy of Suites for Solo Cello (SR 90370) we reviewed in 2010. These days the Oval label pressings from the early 60s almost never sound very good to us. We no longer buy them and we certainly don’t bother to put them in shootouts.

This record on the Oval Label would be very unlikely to qualify as a Hot Stamper pressing anymore, although we liked it just fine in 2010, as you can see from our old review.

In 2024 we actually put an Oval Label pressing of SR 90370 in a shootout and it did about as poorly as we would have expected. What a waste of time and money. Never again.

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A Warm, Rich Piano and Smooth Horns Make All the Difference on Straight, No Chaser

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Thelonious Monk Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our previous shootout was in 2020. The copy from the shootout described below sounded amazing, so we took the time to point out a few of the special qualities that lifted it up above the others we played.

What a recording! If you want to hear just how good Monk’s great big rich piano sounds, look no further. 

Rudy Van Gelder, eat your heart out. Straight, No Chaser has the piano sound Rudy never quite managed.

Some say it’s the crappy workhorse piano he had set up in his studio.  Others say it was just poorly miked.

Rather than speculating on something we know little about (good pianos and the their miking) let’s just say that Columbia had the piano, the room and the mics to do it right as you can easily hear on this very record.

Side Two

Listen to Monk vocalizing — this copy is so resolving you can hear him clearly, yet the overall sound is warm, rich and smooth in the best Columbia tradition.

Speaking of warm, rich and smooth, this is important to the horn sound too. Most copies could not make the sax as full-bodied and free of honk as we would have liked. This one did, earning lots of points in the process. Hard to fault and definitely hard to beat.

Side One

Very clear but as we said above, finding all the fullness is the toughest job in the mastering and pressing of this album. Still, quite good and better than most.

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Piano and Snare Testing with Love Over Gold

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2017 we reviewed a copy of Love Over Gold that really knocked us out. This was sound we had never heard on the album before, so as you can imagine, we had to tell the world -s or at least that small part of the world that accepts the reality of Hot Stamper Pressings — all about it.

Since then we have noted the value of testing albums with pianos and snare drums as those seem to be key part of some recordings that are hard to get right, which of course is makes them good tests.

Telegraph Road does something on this copy that you won’t hear on one out of twenty pressings: It ROCKS. It’s got ENERGY and DRIVE.

Listen to how hard Allan Clark bangs on the piano on side one — he’s pounding that piano with all his might. No other copy managed to get the piano to pop the way it does here, so clear and solid.

Wow, who knew? Maybe this is the reason HP put the record on the TAS Super Disc List. (I rather doubt he’s ever heard a copy this good, but who’s to say?)

Best test for side two?

The snare drum on Industrial Disease. Play five copies of the album and listen on each of them for how much snap there is to the snare. It will be obvious which ones get the transient attack right and which ones don’t. (If none of them do, try five more copies!)

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Caribou Is Usually Noisy and Sounds Bad, But Why?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Elton John Available Now

There’s a good reason you’ve practically never seen this album for sale on our site. In fact there are quite a number of good reasons.

The first one is bad vinyl — most DJM pressings of Caribou are just too noisy to sell. They can look perfectly mint and play noisy as hell; it’s not abuse, it’s bad vinyl.

Empty Sky is the same way; out and out bad vinyl, full of noise, grit and grain.

The second problem is bad sound. Whether it’s bad mastering or bad vinyl incapable of holding onto good mastering, no one can say. Since so many copies were pressed of this monster Number One album (topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic):

  • Perhaps they pressed a few too many after the stampers were worn out.
  • Or pulled too many stampers off the mother.
  • Or made too many stampers from the father.
  • Or used crap vinyl right from the start.

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How Good Are the Domestic Pressings of Days of Future Passed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and the good early imports, you know that the imports just murder the American LPs.

Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, so they tend to sound dubby and smeary, yet strangely they’re also thinner and more transistory than the UK imports, and overall have a fraction of the Tubey Magic that make the good imports such an engaging listening experience.

Moody Blues albums on import are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for these problems. But the properly mastered copies are none of these things.

The cutting engineers who cut the pressings for the U.S. market thought they knew exactly how to fix the problem. When the album came out in America in 1968, leaner and cleaner were in and rich and tubey were out.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super-clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for.

It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the recording with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes. In our experience only the best UK pressings can give you the sound.

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Straight Up Trash from Ron Furmanek on 2 LPs

More of the Music of Badfinger

This British 2 LP reissue from 1993 was (badly) digitally remastered by a Mr. Ron Furmanek. May his name live in infamy.

It contains alternate mixes of 6 songs at 45 RPM on the second record, with sound every bit as bad as the sound of the first record.

The whole Apple series of remastered releases — at least the ones we played — was awful sounding and should be avoided completely. These records are nothing but audiophile bullshit.

If you are a record collector and must have those alternate mixes, just buy the CD. The vinyl is terrible, the CD probably sounds every bit as bad, but at least the CD is cheap and plays all the songs straight through.

If you own this record, my guess is it is pristine.

If you played it at all, you played it once and put it away on a shelf where it probably sits to this very day. Good records get played and bad records get shelved. If you have lots of pristine records filed away, ask yourself: Why aren’t you playing them?

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Digging Bola Sete and Creed Taylor

Hot Stamper Pressings of the CTI Releases Available Now

We are big fans of Bola Sete here – his Tour De Force has been a favorite of ours for more than twenty years (if only we could find clean, good sounding copies to sell)

Recorded in 1966, this vintage stereo pressing boasts exceptionally natural guitar sound, as well as note-like bass and the kind of energy you rarely get outside of a live performance

We’ve been really digging these Creed Taylor productions for years now. On the better albums such as this one, the players tend to sound carefree and loose — you can tell they’re enjoying the hell out of these songs. Don’t get me wrong — we still love the Blue Note and Contemporary label stuff for our more “hard core” jazz needs, but it’s a kick to hear top jazz musicians laying down these grooves and not taking themselves so seriously… especially when it sounds as good as this copy does.

Brilliant Engineering

Val Valentin did an amazing job with the recording of Bola Sete’s live at Montreux album. His list of engineering credits runs for days. Some high points are of course Ella and Louis, followed by Getz/Gilberto, two records that belong in any right-thinking audiophile’s collection.

We played a copy of We Get Requests by the Oscar Peterson Trio not long ago that blew our minds. And we have been big fans of Mel Tormé Swings Shubert Alley for more than a decade.

Pull up his credits on Allmusic. No one I am familiar with other than Rudy Van Gelder recorded more great jazz, and in our opinion Valentin’s recordings are quite a bit more natural sounding than Rudy’s.

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This Tony Hawkins-Mastered Pressing Sure Was a Letdown

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

This London original pressing with 1K/1K stampers (the work of Tony Hawkins) was so bright, dry, and shrill I could hardly stand it for more than the minute it took me to realize it was not going to get any better. The sound is bad enough to send it right into our hall of shame.

There are a number of other Deccas and Londons that we’ve played over the years that were disappointing, and they can be found here.

The copy we had back in 2010 was a very good sounding record, or so we thought.

Maybe we were wrong! It’s not as though we don’t admit to the possibility. You can read all about it below.

Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat is positively WONDERFUL on this copy (A++), and the Sinfonia Sevillana by Turina on side two is every bit as good! The second suite on side one is particularly lovely — check out how rich and full the sound is. Side two has a HUGE soundstage, as wide as they come. The sound is very rich and full of audiophile colors — this is the kind of record that you’re going to love playing for your audio pals!

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Big Drums in a Big Room – Now That’s a Story Worth Telling

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top 100 Titles Available Now

What could be better?

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers, live in the studio sound, this is the album for you.

The opening track on side one of  Every Picture Tells a Story has drums that put to shame 99% of the rock drums ever recorded.

The same is true of I Know I’m Losing You on side two. It just doesn’t get any better for rock drumming, musically or sonically. Micky Waller is brilliant throughout. Kenney Jones, who only plays on the showstopping “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” is clearly out of his mind.

Some of the best rock bass ever recorded can be found here too — punchy, note-like and solid as a rock. If you have the system for it you are going to have a great time playing this one for your friends, audiophiles and otherwise.

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