2-2025

Chicago and The Hottest Sounding Vinyl – Are You a Thrillseeker Too?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

I want to hear the music I love playing louder and sounding better, with more energy and excitement, and the reason I spent an ungodly number of hours over the last 40+ 50+ years working on my stereo is that the kind of sound that can give me thrills doesn’t happen by accident.

You have to work your ass off to get it.

And spend a lot of money.

And search for those pressings that have the sound you are looking for.

And be very lucky.

I don’t play records to sip wine and smoke cigars. I play records to feel something.

Whether the music is rock, jazz or classical, I want to feel the power of the music just as you would feel it at the live event.

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Hearing Is Believing

More Advice on Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

Below you will find some ideas on becoming an expert listener from back in our early shootout days. Those shootouts, like this one, are the very thing that taught me how to improve my underdeveloped listening skills in the first place.

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written in 2006, about two years after we started putting Hot Stampers on our website. This classic release by Cat Stevens took the honors of being the first, and deservedly so. It is one of the all time greats. Sometimes we even have one in stock.

Many of the commentaries from our old site have been transferred to the blog you are reading.  This is one of the earliest ones that we’d written, one we credit with getting the ball rolling for the concept of Hot Stampers and the practices required to find them.

(For those new to the idea, here are the short versions of what they are and how one might go about acquiring them.)

For years we’ve been writing commentaries about the sound of specific records we’ve auditioned. We described their exceptional attributes in detail in order to put them up for sale at admittedly high prices.

By now there are literally hundreds of pages of commentary in which we’ve tried to explain exactly what we listened for and exactly what we heard when playing these pressings. We’ve tried to be as clear as possible about which qualities separate the better sounding LPs from their competitors — what they were doing right, and how we learned to recognize those qualities.

As we’ve gained a better understanding of records and their playback, we’ve made every effort to share with our readers what we’ve learned. (This link will take you to some insights we gained from shootouts for specific titles, complete with notes.)

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It May Be Hard to Believe, But We Actually Enjoy Testing Records

Advice to Help You Make More Progress in Audio

Some audiophile reviewers who are happy to opine at great length about the sound quality of various kinds of discs — both compact and vinyl — make a point of reviewing only those that sound good to them, ignoring the rest. (A small sample of the writings of one such reviewer can be found here on the blog, but there are doubtless others who follow the same approach.)

We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.

Needless to say, we see our role differently. Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things.

They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.

They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.

We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.

It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.

No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a fraction of the records that we have. We’ve been looking for the best sounding pressings of records for a very long time, more than forty years.

Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.

That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.

Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of records is one which we learned to accept as axiomatic. As a born skeptic, this was never difficult for me. Early on in my audio career, sometime in the ’80s, I realized it was self-evident.

The solution we put into practice given the nature of records comprises the four principles we adopted:

  1. We stopped pretending to know something that can’t be known.
  2. We stopped relying on theories proven to have very little if any predictive effect.
  3. We stopped relying on the experts and so-called authorities.
  4. We stopped assuming and speculating and, importantly, we stopped worrying about getting it wrong.

What remained was the simplest possible approach to the problem that would actually work. One that could be taught in a high school science class, if high school science classes were run by skeptical record collectors.

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