2-2023

Letter of the Week – “I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the Hot Stamper Aqualung I just bought.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

This testimonial letter comes from our good customer Roger, who was blown away by the Hot Stamper pressing of Aqualung we sent him [many, many years ago].

Roger, as expected, did a thorough shootout of his own, comparing of our Hot Stamper against the audiophile usual suspects. The result? Another knockout for our Hot Stamper pressing.

Note that a well known audiophile reviewer did his own shootout for the album years ago, failing miserably, unlike our good customer Roger, who succeeded admirably.

Hi Tom,

I have to tell you that I was floored at the sound of the hot stamper Jethro Tull Aqualung I just bought. Darn you again and your hot stampers.

To give you some idea of how many times I have heard this album, backtrack to 1971 when it came out. On a Boy Scout trip a friend of mine had a portable 8-track tape player and this one tape, Aqualung. I remember sleeping on one of the seats in a car with the Aqualung tape on infinite repeat all night. In high school I had the 8-track and listened to this record hundreds of times.

Through the years after becoming an audiophile I bought many different copies looking for the ultimate-sounding LP, finally settling on the MFSL version, which I bought when it came out.

So I had a good time comparing 4 copies:

    1. the MFSL half-speed,
    2. the DCC version,
    3. the 25th anniversary digitally remastered copy,
    4. and the Hot Stamper.

First I tried the 25th anniversary and it was just as I remembered it — it sounds digital, like a CD. Lots of detail, but hard, hyped, edgy, flat soundstage, compressed dynamics. As digital usually sounds, guitars were harsh and jumped unnaturally out of the mix.

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Debussy / La Mer / Haitink

The Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

This is an older review. When we revisited this title recently, we felt it was badly lacking in Tubey Magic, a real deal killer for us here at Better Records.

It’s a decent sounding record, not much more than that, but it does have a top performance. If you see one for cheap in the bins, pick it up and give it a spin.

We prefer Ansermet’s performances for Decca of both La Mer and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.

Our review for the album from years ago can be seen below. As for other records we think we got wrong — we may change our minds again! — you can find more under the heading of Live and Learn.

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Why don’t you give out the stampers for your Hot Stampers pressings?

xxx

More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions

When it comes to stampers, labels, mastering credits, country of origin and the like, we make a point of rarely revealing much of this information on the site, for a number of good reasons we discuss in some depth here.

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a popular but mistaken one.

It’s a beautiful idea that must be resisted in order to make progress.

Answers Or Good Answers?

Audiophiles, like most people, want answers. 

But in the world of records, consistently good answers are very hard to come by.

For audiophiles in search of better sound, the only approach with any real hope of success is this: doing the hard work required to find the best answer you can under your present circumstances — your present equipment, your present tweaks, your present room, your present electrical quality, your present listening skills, your present table setup, et cetera, et cetera.

For those who are interested in pursuing audio and records at the highest levels, we explain in this commentary the work it takes: The science of Hot Stampers – incomplete, imperfect, and provisional

We have a section on the website you may have seen called live and learn. This section (115+ strong!) is devoted to the discussion of records we think we got, uh, wrong.

Oh yes, it’s true. But it’s not really a problem for us here at Better Records. We see no need to cover up our mistaken judgments. The process of learning involves recognizing and correcting previous errors. Approached scientifically, the gaining of knowledge — in any field, not just record collecting or music reproduction — is slow, incremental and riddled with mistakes.

What seems true today might easily be proven false tomorrow.

If you haven’t found that out for yourself firsthand, one thing’s for sure, you haven’t been in this hobby for very long.

We’re so used to the conventional wisdom being wrong, and having our own previous findings overturned by new ones, that we gladly go out of way in listing after listing to point out just how wrong we were. (And of course why we think we are correct now.)

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.

Each time we go back and play a 180 gram or half-speed mastered LP we used to like (or dislike), we gain a better understanding of its true nature. 

Record cleaning gets better, front ends get better, electronics get better, tweaks get better — everything in your audio system should be improving on a regular basis, allowing you to more correctly identify the strengths and weaknesses of every record you play. (I almost forgot: your ears get better too!) If that’s not happening, we can help you make it happen.

What follows is a typical excerpt from a recent listing.

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Is This Bill Halverson’s Engineering Masterpiece?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

This listing for the White Hot Stamper pressing we put up years ago was written around 2007. A few points have been added since then.

When all the elements are working together as they do here, the music on Steve Stills’ first album is positively AMAZING. Until I hear something better, I’m going to have to call this Bill Halverson‘s engineering masterpiece.* Yes, on the best copies it’s that good.

UPDATE 2024

We have now discovered something even better, an album from earlier in the same year in fact, Deja Vu.

What to Listen For

Both sides can be rich and full-bodied, as well as transparent, with lots of separation between the parts. Most copies tend to be murky, thick, and veiled. The overall sound here is airy, open, and spacious, with TONS of ambience.

Check out the sound of Booker T’s big organ solo on Love The One You’re With — you can really hear the air moving through the instrument. That’s what a Hot Stamper pressing is all about.

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Heavy Vinyl Quality Control? We Put That Proposition to the Test

bellcurve500

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

Part one of this commentary concerns the random results of all record making processes. It can be found here.

A Heavy Vinyl Shootout

A number of years ago (2011?) we had the opportunity to crack open two brand new sealed copies of a recently remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing came our way. I already had one which I was waiting to audition, so that meant there were actually three copies to play.

At the time, we were told that with this pressing every effort was made to produce the highest quality product and to maintain the utmost in quality control throughout the production process. They fellow representing the company distributing the title was adamant that every copy produced, from first to last, would be indistiguishable from any other — not just in terms of surfaces, but sound quality too.

To accomplish this feat, the producer used the real master tapes (we were told, no reason to doubt him), had a well known mastering engineer do the mastering at a highly-regarded studio, then had a well-known audiophile pressing plant in Germany make the record, using the finest vinyl compounds available, in presses that meet the highest standards in the industry, operated by skilled individuals of the utmost professionalism.

Any stamper would be replaced long before it could possibly be showing any wear.

All the metal mothers and stampers would be made in a way designed to eliminate all variation.

One and only one complete run would be made. If another was needed at some later date the whole process would have to be started over from scratch using the same strict quality controls.

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Robert Brook Digs Deep and “Gets” Down to Earth

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Featuring the Piano

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for a record we had very much enjoyed while doing the shootout for it a few years back, Down to Earth.

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are exceptionally good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

DIGGING DEEP Into The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s DOWN TO EARTH

Other records that we have found to be good for testing and improving your playback can be found here.

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Do Reviewers Have What It Takes to Play an Album Like This?

More Albums that Come Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume

Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.

If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.

Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.

We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.

Who knew?  We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.

Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound?

Not that I know of.

Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?

Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.

They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.

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Why Would Anyone Want to Take All the Fun Out of CCR’s Music? Part Two

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

This commentary is at least ten years old. Still holds up though!

The last time I played one of Chad’s CCR pressings, which I confess was close to a decade ago, it had all the bad qualities of the Bonnie Raitt disc on DCC, a sound that I’ve grown to dislike more with each passing year.

But what the new AP version really gets wrong is the guitar sound.

Creedence’s music lives or dies by its grungy guitars, and the AP pressing is as wrong as they come.

Latest Findings as of 2022

This commentary used to end this way:

The fat, smeary, overly-smooth guitars you hear on the record, lacking any semblance of the grungy energy that are the true hallmarks of this band’s recordings, probably means that some audiophile mastering engineer got hold of the tapes and tried to “fix” what he didn’t like about the sound.

You know, the sound that is all over the radio to this very day. Something was apparently wrong with it. So now that it’s been fixed, everything that’s good about CCR’s recordings is missing, and everything that has replaced those sonic elements has made the sound worse.

Nice job! Keep up the good work. Chad is proud of ya, no doubt about it.

It has now become clear that the various mastering engineers Chad hires are not the ones trying to fix what they don’t like about the sound. Chad is El Jefe, the one telling them what to fix and rejecting their work until these remastered albums sound the way he wants them to sound.

There is no use complaining about the awful work Doug Sax, Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, George Marino or anyone else did when hired to master for Analogue Productions. Their task was to please Chad. He is the customer, he is the one paying their fees, and he is the one getting the sound he wants.

He apparently thinks he is saving the world from bad sound, but we sure don’t see it that way. Just the opposite in fact.

If Chad wanted better sounding records — records that are more lively, more tonally accurate, less bloated down low and less smoothed-over up top — veteran engineers such as the gentlemen named above would surely have been able to master these titles more correctly than the evidence provided by the records would lead you to believe.

But Chad, like many other audiophiles, is a My-Fi guy, not a Hi-Fi guy, and he likes the sound he likes, regardless of what is on the master tapes or what other pressings — mastered by a number of different engineers, often over the course of many decades — might sound like.

He wants the sound he wants, and their job is to give it to him.

Bernie Grundman, the man in charge of remastering Aja, is finding out that his way is not going to work for Chad. If it takes seven test pressings before Aja has the sound Chad likes, then he will just have to keep working it until Chad hears “his Aja” sounding the way it should.

When it finally comes out, I have no doubt that it will be very different from any pressing of Aja you or I have ever heard. It won’t sound much like the early pressings that Bernie Grundman mastered for ABC in 1977, which are of course the ones we sell. Unless I miss my guess, it will be very different from the master tape. (Something I freely admit I have no way of ever knowing.)

It will sound the way Chad likes music to sound. He paid a small fortune for the privilege of making Steely Dan sound the way he wants them to sound. Now that the die is cast, those of us with good stereos and basic critical listening skills can go pound sand. The mid-fi guys are being pandered to — in the audiophile world, that’s where the Heavy Vinyl money is — and expecting anything else from this atrocious label means you haven’t been listening very carefully to the records they’ve been releasing for more than 30 years.

Will I Like the New Steely Dan Remasters?

If you think this pressing of Tea for the Tillerman sounds good, it’s a near certainty you will want to be the first on your block to collect all the newly remastered Steely Dan Heavy Vinyls.

The same goes for this pressing of Stand Up. If this is the sound you are looking for, you can be sure Chad will give it to you, good and hard (apologies to H.L. Mencken).

Do these records sound fine to you? You’re happy with them, are you?

Then you have much to look forward to with the release of the complete Steely Dan LP collection!

These Analogue Productions releases will no doubt share many of the sonic characteristics of the above-mentioned titles.

How could they not? They are guaranteed to sound the way Chad wants them to sound. Chad is the customer, and the customer is always right.

If you’re Bernie Grundman, it might take you six or seven runs at it until you find that indescribable and elusive “Chad” sound, but you will have to keep at it until you do, assuming you want to get paid.

Our review for the first of the series that we’ve had the chance to play is in, and here it is.

Could it have been worse? Absolutely. Is it really very good? No, it’s not.

Considering his dismal track record, it’s probably as good sounding a record as Chad is able to make.

To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy:

It’s a mess of a record, ain’t it, Tom?

If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gets here.

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Art Pepper+Eleven – Hard to Beat for Music or Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

If you buy only one large group jazz record from us, make it this one – the music is swingin’ fun and the sound is going to blow your mind.

And that’s doubly true if you own any modern reissue. (The best early OJC pressings can be good but often suffer from the standard problems OJCs tend to have — they lack weight, Tubey Magic and can get a bit hot up top.)

This is the kind of sound no later pressing from ANY era can compete with. Last time around we noted:

This vintage Contemporary stereo pressing has plenty of Modern Jazz Classics Magic. On a copy such as this you can really pick out each of the musicians and follow them throughout the course of the track. Being able to appreciate everyone’s contributions really gives you a sense of how much work went into the making of this album. It’s nothing short of epic.

This is one DYNAMIC jazz record — drop the needle on any track and prepare to be knocked out.

The sound is full-bodied and energetic, with breathy brass and plenty of studio ambience.

As is so often is the case with the best Contemporary records, thanks must go to Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.

If I could only have one Art Pepper record, this would be the one.

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Do I already have some Hot Stamper pressings in my collection?

More Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, you do.

You just don’t know which ones they are.

If you have a good sized collection of LPs, mastered and pressed from the 50s through the 80s, and in some cases beyond, you surely do.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that you wouldn’t have at least some.

The problem is, how can you know which records have Hot Stampers and which ones don’t?

Familiarity with the conventional wisdom regarding which labels and stampers are supposed to have better sound is really not much help in this regard, despite what you may have heard, and is often misleading when not outright erroneous.

The only way to recognize a Hot Stamper pressing is through the shootout process.

If you’ve done shootouts for your favorite albums on your own (or with friends), pitting five or ten cleaned copies of the same record against one another, then you definitely have Hot Stampers in your collection, and you know exactly which ones they are — they’re the ones that won the shootout.

One very important fact to keep in mind: Hot Stampers and good sounding records are not the same thing.

And some shootouts are not worthy of the name. Only that rare audiophile who conducts rigorous shootouts of multiple LPs from different eras can know which are the best sounding pressings (keeping in mind that the results from any given shootout, like any scientific finding, are provisional.)

How hot your shootout winners are relative to the records we sell is a much more difficult question to answer, and can really only be answered by pitting our copy against yours, head to head.

Some of our customers have carried out their own shootouts and shared with us the results.

It’s true, we only printed the ones that made us look good, but what did you expect us to do?

Needless to say, we welcome the challenge! And we happily refund your money if you believe your copy bests ours.

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