Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now
All the copies we had in our shootout were pressed domestically, and none of them were mastered by the legendary Robert Ludwig except for the one whose stampers you see below.
We awarded both sides of RL’s cutting a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+, which means the sound is passable at best, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning it would probably not even earn that single plus.)
We do not sell records with 1+ grades. We figure you can find those on your own. The world is full of them, as are most audiophile record collections.
1+ is actually a fairly good grade for many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today. Some of the ones we’ve reviewed can be found in our Heavy Vinyl mediocrities section.
Any version of the album we sell will be noticeably — and probably dramatically — better sounding.
If you own any of those titles and didn’t pay much for them, you didn’t get ripped off too badly. You got something for your money. Not much, but something, and it would surprise us no end if any of them have been played much. Mediocre records tend to spend most of their lives sitting on record shelves. They’re not good enough sounding to bother with.
If you have any of these specific Heavy Vinyl pressings, something is wrong somewhere and it would be a good idea for you to figure out what before you flush any more money down the drain.
General Advice
On this title, forget the Brits. Every British pressing we played was badly smeared and veiled.
This took us somewhat by surprise because we happen to like the British PG pressings. However, So on British vinyl is awful too, so it’s clear (to us anyway) that the later PG records are bad on British vinyl and the early ones are better.
We are limiting our comments here to albums up through So. Anything after that is more or less terra incognita for us simply because we don’t care for any of the music he was making after 1986.
