bad-stamps

Here are listings withl some of the worst sounding stampers we discovered while doing our shootouts.

Our History with Led Zeppelin’s Rock Classic from 1990 – 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2010 we wrote the overview below about what we thought we knew about Zep II. We have since amended the text in a few places and added some links. Please to enjoy.

This is undoubtedly one of the best, maybe THE best hard rock recording of all time, but you need a good pressing if you’re going to unleash anything approaching its full potential. We just conducted a shootout and heard MUCH more bad sound than good. You name it — imports, reissues, originals — we’ve played ’em, and most of them were TERRIBLE.

Especially the non-RL originals. That’s some of the worst sound we’ve ever heard.

If you see a “J” stamper, run for your life.

The best copies of Zep II have the kind of rock and roll firepower that’s guaranteed to bring any system to its knees. I can tell you with no sense of shame whatsoever that I do not have a system powerful enough to play this record at the levels I was listening to it at in one of our shootouts a while back. When the big bass comes in, hell yeah it distorts. It would have distorted worse at any concert the band ever played. Did people walk out, or ask the band to turn down the volume? No way. The volume IS the sound.

(more…)

Shootout Winning Stampers for La Boutique Fantasque Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rossini Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our current favorite recording of La Boutique Fantasque is the one Solti recorded for Decca in 1957.

It belongs to that very special group of roughly 150 orchestral recordings which have the potential to offer the discriminating (and well-heeled) audiophile the best performances of major works with by far the highest quality sound.

It has been our experience that modern remastered pressings simply cannot compete with the best pressings of these landmark recordings.

The Fiedler (LSC 2084) is still a very good record, but we no longer see much reason to carry it when the Solti is better in almost every way (and quieter as a rule to boot).

Below we have reproduced our full stamper sheet, including the Shootout Winning stampers, which happen to be 3S/4S for this album.

(more…)

Stick with Porky on East Side Story

More Hot Stamper Pressings We Only Offer on Import Vinyl Available Now

Porky cut the original British pressings of this Squeeze album, one of countless personal favorites of yours truly. They are records (and cassettes and CDs) I have played hundreds of times and still listen to regularly to this very day, in this case more than forty years after I purchased my first copy. (Good albums age well.)

I would have picked the record out of the bin at my local Tower Records, probably based on the radio play Tempted was getting.

That copy undoubtedly would have been domestic and made from a sub-generation tape, although I’m quite sure I could not have recognized what constituted dubby sound back then. In 1981, what I understood about the importance of different record pressings would have fit comfortably in a thimble.

I had my MoFi’s, and although I hate to admit it, that’s about as far as I had gotten in my quest for superior sounding pressings. You could add Nautilus and a few other Half-Speeds to the list of what pressing I thought were impressive, leaving plenty of room in that thimble unfilled.

Thankfully those bad old days are gone, and the music can now, finally, live and breath on the best of these imports from the UK. Of course they are the only ones we buy these days for our shootouts. The others are what are known around these parts as “mistakes.”

Sometimes the imported pressings are mastered by Porky and sometimes they are not. The ones that are not tend to have a lot of problems, as you can see from our stamper sheet below.

When Porky is not on side one, that side will tend to be hard, lean and bright. Side two of that copy had decent sound, earning a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+.

(more…)

These Are the Stampers to Avoid on With The Beatles

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

In our experience, the stereo pressings with -2/-2 stampers are terrible sounding. We do not have any on hand, but we doubt that -1/-1 — the original, the first, the one approved by George Martin himself! — is any better.

With -2 stampers this is a hall of shame pressing, as well as another early LP reviewed and found wanting.

That Old Canard

The early pressings are consistently grittier, edgier and more crude than the later pressings we’ve played. So much for the idea that the “original is better.” When it comes to With The Beatles it just ain’t so, and it doesn’t take a state of the art system or a pair of golden ears to hear it.

The audiophile and record collecting community seems to have failed to reckon with the faults of the early Beatles pressings, but we here at Better Records are doing our best to correct their misperceptions, one Hot Stamper pressing at a time.

It may be a lot of work, but we don’t mind — we love The Beatles! We want to find the best sounding copies of ALL their records, and there is simply no other way to do it than to play them by the dozens, as you can see from the picture below.

(more…)

FM Radio Sound on Blue Vinyl, Courtesy of a Mr. Gene Thompson

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Here is how we described a recent Shootout Winning copy of 1967-1970:

This vintage import 2-LP compilation set boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides. These pressings are rich, smooth and sweet, with plenty of Tubey Magic and little of the grain and grunge of most Brits (and don’t get us started on the domestics).

You get clean, clear, full-bodied, lively and musical ANALOG sound from first note to last. Like most compilations, some songs sound better than others, but “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Come Together” are two that really stand out here. For those of you out there who have never tried one of our Hot Stamper Beatles records, this may be the best sound you’ve ever heard from them. The CDs — even the new ones — sure don’t sound like this!

We are on record as finding the British pressings of 1967-1970 too bright; certainly most of them are anyway. The original domestic pressings, as anyone who has ever played one can attest, mastered at Sterling no less, are absolutely godawful.

Allow us to add one more to that group of pressings to avoid, the blue vinyl domestic pressings mastered by Gene Thompson. Based on how awful this pressings sounds, it would probably be wise to avoid his work in general.

The only artists who have earned the honor (ahem) of having their very own page on this blog are The Beatles. For those of you interested in learning more about their often amazing recordings, feel free to dig in to your heart’s delight.

(more…)

Why Are the Earliest Stampers on 461 Ocean Boulevard So Bad Sounding on Side Two?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

The UK pressings with the side two stampers shown below have not done well in our shootouts for a number of years now. If you own a copy with B-1 stampers on side two, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of 461 Ocean Boulevard than you have ever heard.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, a subject we discuss below, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and substandard sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and avoid copies with the B-1 marking on side two.

Bilbo cut the A-3 side one and did a great job; his side one won our most recent shootout.

Whoever cut side two really screwed it up, as you can see from our notes for our last two shootouts.

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

The idea that the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken one, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers.

In the world of records, there aren’t many, but B-1 for side two of this album is a clear exception to the rule that the stamper numbers are one part of a multi-faceted puzzle. In this case, B-1 is awful and is best avoided at all costs.

The Biz

Being in the shootout business means we have no way to avoid such realities, which is why it is so easy for us to accept them.

The amateurs and professionals alike who review records for audiophiles want there to be clear-cut answers for every album they write about. Uncertainty and trade-offs upset them no end.

We recognized twenty years ago that the empirical pursuit of record knowledge, practiced scientifically, must be understood as incomplete, imperfect, and provisional.

That is not going to change no matter how upsetting anyone may find it.

(more…)

Helpful Stamper Information You Can Use – Episode 108

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

British Pressing? Check.

Pink Label? Check.

Sound Quality?  Side One:: 1+ (dubby). Side One of another copy: NFG (no good).

Apparently something went wrong, but exactly what, nobody really knows.

And if for some reason somebody actually believes they know what went wrong, we tell them that that kind of thinking is detrimental to whatever success they hope to achieve in finding better sounding records, if our experience over the last fifty years has any bearing.

We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended to. All our knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.

If somehow we did know it all, there would be no need for the two hundred entries in our live and learn section about all the mistakes we’ve made over the years trying to understand record pressings at the sonic level.

We take a different approach to searching out better sounding pressings. Instead of reading about them — who made them, how they were made, where they were made, all that sort of thing — we instead devoted our efforts to cleaning and playing them, so that we could make our own judgments about the sound and the music we heard.

Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed over the course of the last twenty years, produce all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the rankings for all the records in-between.

Free Stamper Info

By my count this is the 108th stamper sheet we have posted on The Skeptical Audiophile.

In the case of this title, these are what we would call bad stampers for Genesis’s 1973 prog album Selling England by the Pound (a record we rarely have in stock because the best stampers are just too hard to find, at least they are on copies in audiophile playing condition).

If you are looking for top quality sound — and seriously, what else would you be looking for if you are reading this blog? —  then make sure not to buy just any old early Pink Label UK pressing of the album. You may end up with one that sounds as bad as this one did.

(more…)

Out To Lunch on Liberty UA – “The Worst. So Metallic.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner of Out to Lunch we played in 2023, we wrote:

Out To Lunch is finally back on the site after a four year hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early pressing.

Dolphy’s debut for Blue Note is an absolute knockout musically, and the quality of the sound on this pressing was everything we could have hoped for.

Both of these sides are amazingly transparent, with stunning immediacy and exceptional clarity – thanks, RVG!

Bobby Hutcherson murders on the vibes on this album – hearing his stellar, groundbreaking work played back on a Top Shelf (3+/3+) copy through a high-end stereo is nothing less than a thrill.

Turn this one up good and loud and revel in the glory that is Out To Lunch, the man’s Masterpiece, and a Must Own jazz album from 1964.

However, if you made the mistake of buying a Black and Blue Liberty UA label pressing, the one that came out in 1970, what you heard bears absolutely no resemblance to the glorious sound we describe above.

Black & light blue label with Blue Note 70’s logo in a square on left, Liberty UA. Inc., Los Angeles, California text on bottom. Runout is etched apart from “VAN GELDER” and “STEREO” that is stamped.

Yes, it may have been mastered by RVG himself, but it sure doesn’t sound much like the better pressings of the album we played in our shootout.

You might think that if Rudy recorded it, he should have known how to master it, so why pay the big bucks for the originals when the man himself was still cutting Blue Note pressings as late as 1970.

Seems like a good rule of thumb to follow, but in this case, it turns out to be a badly mistaken one.

(more…)

These PR Stampers Are NFG and Then Some

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of the music of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young performing are about the best we can do for the fans of this groundbreaking band at present.

We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites and have been since they were released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around).

We love the album but not when it sounds like this!

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

(more…)

How Would You Ever Know This Was a Good Recording with these Crap Pressings to Play?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

You sure wouldn’t know this was a good recording by playing the crappy reissues Capitol put out on the Yellow Label in 1975.
We found that they tend to suffer from these sonic shortcomings:
They are either dark and recessed, and/or murky and smeary.

There are good Rainbow Label pressings and bad ones. We of course only sell the good ones.

Here is how we described our most recent White Hot shootout winner.
  • With two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this early Capitol pressing could not be beat.
  • This copy gets the midrange right, and since that is where The Beach Boys’ voices are, that puts it ahead of everything else we heard.
  • What’s shocking to those of us who have played The Beach Boys records by the bucketful is how rich and open the best pressings of this album are.
  • You will have an awfully hard time finding another Beach Boys album that sounds as good as this one, and you may just find that it simply can’t be done.

(more…)