bad-stamps

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

How Does the Capitol Club Cutting of Master of Reality Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now

Somebody at Capitol did not do a very good job when cutting this album for members of the Capitol Record Club. The sound is papery, gritty, and, not to put too fine a point on it, just awful.

Did he try real hard and fail? Was he incompetent? Was he lazy? I doubt we’ll never know!

Discogs gives out the following info for the release:

Mastering at Artisan Sound Recorders and pressing by Columbia Records Pressing Plant, Scranton are uncredited on release. 

    • Matrix / Runout (Side A ): SW-1-93896 W2#1 (IAM Scranton Identifier)
    • Matrix / Runout (Side B): SW2-93896-R4 (IAM Scranton Identifier)

Hard to believe Artisan and IAM would do such a bad job, but if Discogs is to be believed, apparently it’s possible.

Not all record club pressings are bad though; that’s painting with too broad a brush.

Here’s one we are big fans of.

Of course, it helps if your record club pressings are mastered by Bill Kipper at Masterdisk.

He was one of the greats, and there is simply no one like him alive today, at least as far as we know. We had this to say about that subject many years ago:

Think what a different audio world it would be if we still had Bill Kipper with us today, along with the amazingly accurate and resolving cutting system he used at Masterdisk.

As far as we can tell, there are no records being produced today that sound remotely as good as this budget subscription disc.

Furthermore, to my knowledge no record this good has been cut for more than thirty years. The world is awash in mediocre remastered records and we want nothing to do with any of them, not when there are so many good vintage pressings still to be discovered and enjoyed.

The likes of Bill Kipper are no longer with us, but we can be thankful that we still have the records he and so many talented others mastered all those years ago, to enjoy now and for countless years to come.

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Could This Be the Sound Audiophiles Complain About with RVG’s Mastering?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

A rare and expensive early mono pressing that we put into our most recent shootout was dreadful sounding.

Our main listening guy owns the record and made the note you see below, saying that his personal copy is every bit as bad.

The sound of the original was painfully midrangy and crude. It was not the worst of all the pressings we played, but it was nevertheless pretty bad, sounding nothing like our shootout winners.

We had a pressing on an early Prestige label in stereo, also mastered by Rudy Van Gelder, that was reasonably good sounding, earning grades of 1.5+ to 2+. It was sweet and relaxed, but relatively small and lacked the weight of the best.

For this music, we’ve found the best sound on the better Two-Fer pressings and the right OJC.

That Two-Fer budget reissue pressing, remastered by David Turner in 1972, can do very well in a shootout, but it can also fall far short of the mark on some sides, as you can see from the grades for these three other copies.

If you have the Two-Fer, how does yours sound compared to the four we auditioned (a shootout we were doing for the third or fourth time I might add), and how could you possibly know such a thing without a great many more copies at hand to clean and play?

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On Porgy and Bess, Stick with the Early Pressings on the Black Label

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Belafonte Available Now

A Living Stereo knockout! We sometimes forget to spend time with records like this when there are so many Zeppelin and Floyd records waiting to be played (and a lot more customers waiting to get hold of them to add to their collection).

We’ve always enjoyed Belafonte At Carnegie Hall, but when we’ve dug further into his catalog we’ve been left cold more often than not. However, when we finally got around to dropping the needle on a few of these many years ago we were very impressed by the music and blown away by the sound on the better pressings.

Just make sure that you avoid the orange label reissues.

They are dry, gritty and spitty. The notes below show a side one earning a single plus (1+) not-quite-Hot Stamper grade. We discuss its faults on the far right, and the other orange label pressing we played was even worse, earning a grade of NFG.

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These Are the Stampers to Avoid on The Doors’ Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

In our experience, the Gold Label stereo originals with 1B/1B stampers are terrible sounding.

With 1B stampers it’s bad enough to go into our hall of shame for vintage pressings.

(Bad sounding audiophile records, being so plentiful, especially these days, have their own hall of shame.)

No surprise there; it’s just another bad sounding original pressing that ended up doing poorly in one of our shootouts.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.

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These Are the Stampers to Avoid on A Hard Day’s Night

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 Beatles LP reviewed and found seriously wanting.

You may know that the pressings with -2 stampers are the ones that come in the original BC-13 Beatles Box from 1978.

Some of the titles in that set can sound very good, but this is not one of them. To recognize a mid-70s pressing, note that the back of the jacket will have a laminate strip on the side. At the bottom of this post you can find a picture of it.

Avoid that cover and the record inside it if you want a good sounding pressing of A Hard Day’s Night.

That Old Canard

The early pressings are consistently grittier, edgier and more crude than the later pressings we’ve played. So much for that old canard that “the original is better.” When it comes to A Hard Day’s Night 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 community seems not to have caught on to the faults of the early Beatles pressings, but we here at Better Records are doing our best to correct these and other misconceptions, 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, preferably by the dozens.

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Sterling Cut By Far the Best Sounding Pressings of I’m Ready

Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available Now

Forget the reissue copies that come in the cover you see to the left, the one with a thin black border.

If you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper early domestic pressing is the only way to go.

And take it from us, you need to see the Sterling mark in the dead wax of your pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.

As you can see from the notes above, the two reissue non-Sterling copies we played had hopelessly bad sound.

One was smeary, hard and hot.

The other was the brightest and most spitty.

Note that we didn’t deem it necessary to play side two of either copy. A one plus side one rules out the possibility of it being a Hot Stamper pressing.

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

Based on our experience, I’m Ready sounds its best:

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Sidewinder on the Liberty Label Might Sound Dubby and Weird

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

The top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1500 and, in our opinion, was worth every penny of that amount, being one of the best sounding jazz records we have ever played

It probably took us ten years to get this latest shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort — what a record!

The copies that do not have VAN GELDER in the dead wax are very unlikely to be any good. The Liberty label pressing that we played in our shootout was minty and cost us a pretty penny, but the sound was No F***ing Good.

It’s yet another reason we don’t judge records by their labels.

Of course, as all our customers know, we judge records by one thing and one thing only: their sound.

Our shootout winner may have been a reissue, but it sure wasn’t one of those copies you can find on the Liberty label without VAN GELDER in the dead wax.

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Strawberry Cut By Far the Best Sounding Pressings of Zenyatta Mondatta

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sting and The Police Available Now

Forget the domestic pressings, forget the lightweight Nautilus Half-Speed, forget whatever lame reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper UK pressing is the only way to go.

And take it from us, you need to see that little Strawberry marking in the dead wax of your UK pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.

Why go to all that trouble? Because the album is an absolute classic – it leads off with “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and never lets up. (Well, toward the end of side two it lets up, but it’s plenty strong before then.)

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

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Audiophiles Should Give Monteux’s Surprise and Clock Symphonies a Miss

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joseph Haydn Available Now

None of the pressings we played of this RCA (LSC 2394) were remotely competitive with Fjelstad’s recording for RCA from 1959.

The sound of the RCA Shaded Dog we played was consistently compressed and veiled, a case of the “old record” sound we find on far too many vintage pressings.

The world is full of old records that just sound like old records. We’ve suffered through them by the tens of thousands.

Our website, as well as this blog, are devoted to helping audiophiles find pressings that don’t sound anything like the millions of run-of-the-mill LPs that have been stamped out for the last seven decades.

Even a million dollar stereo can’t make the average record sound good, and the more accurate and revealing the system, the more limited and lifeless the average record will show itself to be.

The White Dog pressing was even worse. It was hot, dry and flat. Who wants to play a record that sounds like that?

Only an old school audio system can hide the faults of pressings such as these. The world is full of those too, even though they might comprise all the latest and most expensive components.

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The Wrong Stampers on Some Albums Are Shockingly Bad

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Carly Simon Available Now

Below you will see the bottom part of the stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.

Please note that the album you see pictured is not the record we are discussing here. It very well could have been been a Carly Simon album, or something from some other artist, but all we can say for sure is that it was definitely an album from the 70s on Elektra.

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that avoiding these bad labels for the record in question would make it fairly easy to figure out what the better pressings of the album might be.

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own.

We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out the kind of information that makes it is easy to find the best pressings is where we have chosen to draw it. The top copies are the ones that pay the bills around here, and with a staff of ten, in California no less, the bills are sizable.

We appreciate your understanding.

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