bad-stamps

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

Is Digital Really the Problem on this Cowboy Junkies Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Digital Recordings with Audiophile Sound 

The RCA domestic pressings cut at Sterling are not worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.

Don’t be one of those die-hard analog types who point fingers at the fact that there was digital in the recording chain when their pressing doesn’t sound good.

It’s got nothing to do with digital. It has everything to do with Sterling doing a bad job mastering the domestic vinyl.

(Keep in mind that a very large group of audiophiles, including some well-known reviewers, had no idea there was a digital step used in the process of making some of the records they had raved about. Apparently the only way to hear it is when you already know it’s there.)

Our notes for the domestic pressing below read:

  • Flat and dry vox.
  • Shifted up [tonally]
  • A bit scooped [or “sucked out” in the midrange, meaning the middle of the midrange is missing to some degree]

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart from each other and you can get that sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Why Defend the Indefensible?

When good mastering houses like Kendun and Sterling and Artisan make bad sounding records, we offer no excuses for their shoddy work. The same would be true for the better-known cutting engineers who’ve done work for them, as well as other cutting operations.

Individuals working for generally good companies sometimes produce substandard work product.

How is this news to anyone outside of the sycophantic thread posters, youtubers, and self-identified record experts who write for the audiophile community?

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Even in the Quietest Moments – P & M Stampers Let Us Down This Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

After discovering killer Hot Stampers for this forgotten classic, we feel the album can hold its own with any of Supertramp’s 70s releases, from Crime of the Century all the way through to Breakfast in America.

The UK-pressed White Hot Stamper pressings from our recent shootouts showed us some of the best Supertramp sound we have ever heard on any of their albums, which is saying a lot. Supertramp is one of the most well-recorded bands in the history of pop music. Geoff Emerick took over most of the recording duties after the band decided to work with a different engineer for this, their 1977 album.

KEN SCOTT recorded the two albums that came before this one, Crime and Crisis, and as has been well documented on this very site, he knocked both of them out of the park.

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Audiophiles Should Avoid These Stampers on LSC 2435

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

We had two copies with 10s/10s stampers and both of them ended up at the bottom of the rankings with a decnt side one but a terrible side two, earning a grade of NO, meaning just awful.

1.5/NO, 10S, 10S, Shaded Dog
1.5/NO, 10S/10S, Shaded Dog

Note also that our 1s side one did not win the shootout, although the sound was still quite good and better than most of what we played.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

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Avoid M Stampers and Imports If You Want the Best Sound on Tapestry

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Carole King Available Now

The domestic pressings with the stampers shown below, and others similar to them, have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of Tapestry than you have ever heard. It won’t be cheap, but we can guarantee that it will be very, very good.

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 decidedly mediocre sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

Note that the last listing is for an early UK import. I have no idea how that record got into the shootout. The chances of an import doing well up against Bernie Grundman’s brilliant mastering — from back in the good old days of the 60s, 70s and 80s when he was actually doing brilliant mastering work — is so close to zero it can’t be calculated.

Sometimes we take long shots, hoping to learn something new. In this case, we learned what we already know. Yes, there are still some audiophiles who buy imports of a record like this hoping to find better sound. I can’t imagine what kind of system it would take to hide the bright, dubby sound of the UK pressing we played, but judging from some of the foolishness I read on the Hoffman forum and others of its ilk, I know there must be plenty of them out there.

Monarch is responsible for the mediocre-at-best sound of the pressings with the stampers you see above. We tend to like Monarch pressings as a rule, but sometimes they mess up, and they messed up Tapestry compared to others who pressed the record.

We liked all the other copies with other stampers better than than these, which just goes to show you can never know how good it can get until it gets that good. That is what shootouts allow us to do.

Playing close to twenty copies of Tapestry in a shootout allows us to grade Tapestry on a scale, with the M stampers filling out most of the bottom and the other stampers — wouldn’t you like to know which ones! — occupying the middle and the top of the distribution. 

This is what the forum posters fail to understand. They think they have a Hot Stamper when what they actually have (maybe!) is a good sounding record. They don’t know how amazing the record can sound — so much more amazing than the one they own, probably — so they assume they have something good, maybe even the best.

They probably do not, but who really knows? The shootout would supply the data they need to support their conclusions, and since they could not be bothered to conduct one, they have no data to back up their opinions.

The “probably” you see in the above two sentences is there for a good reason. We make a point of being clear about what we can know and we cannot know, and we cannot know what a record sounds like until we play it.

This is obviously true for those of us who try to listen as critically as possible, but we also know that it is just as important to think about records the right way.

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These Are Just Some of the Stampers to Avoid on Catch Bull at Four

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

The domestic pressings of Catch Bull at Four with the stampers shown below, and others similar to them, have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of Catch Bull at Four 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 decidedly mediocre sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

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 idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers.

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Did We Get The Power of the Orchestra Wrong, or Are These Just Bad Stampers?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

In 2007, we wrote the following review for The Power of the Orchestra, VCS 2659:

DEMO DISC QUALITY ORCHESTRAL SOUND like you will not believe. We put two top copies together to bring you the ultimate-sounding Pictures At An Exhibition. Folks, it doesn’t get any better than this for huge orchestral dynamics and energy.

I confess I badly misjudged this record over the course of the last few years. I remember liking it in the early ’90s; at that time it was the only Golden Age recording of Pictures whose performance moved me. I never liked the famous Reiner, LSC 2201, and Ansermet’s performance on London also lacks drive and coherency in my opinion.

I then went on to extoll the many virtues of the recording, making special mention of the brass, dynamics and bass, which you can read about here.

More recently we played a copy of VCS 2659 in one of our regular Pictures at an Exhibition shootouts and were not the least bit impressed by it.

Side One:

Steely and opaque, not that good.

Side Two:

Strings are not very [unintelligible, might be bright], not much weight.

In other words, it just sounded like an old record.

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For the Mendelssohn and Prokofiev Violin Concertos‎, These Are the Stampers to Avoid

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin

None of the White Dog pressings we played in our most recent shootout were better than mediocre, and the 70s Red Seal pressings were uniformly awful as well.

We had two different side ones with 8s stampers, and two different sides twos with 5s and 7s, respectively. (One of our Shaded Dogs had a 5s side two but it sounded quite a bit better than the White Dog side two with 5s.)

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

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The D4/D5 Stereo Pressings Are Just Awful on My Fair Lady

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring Shelly Manne Available Now

In our experience, the Black Label stereo originals with D4/D5 stampers are terrible sounding.

With those stampers, My Fair Lady is undoubtedly a hall of shame pressing, as well as another early pressing we’ve reviewed and found wanting.

Both sides graded “No,” our not-especially-technical term for a record that sounds really bad.

Notes for Side One:

Track one is bright and unnatural up top. Track two is not very musical.

Notes for Side Two:

Track one is very weird sounding, thin and small.

(Obviously there was no need to play a second track.)

As you may have read elsewhere on the site, some Contemporary label originals are very poorly mastered, which should put paid to the idea that Hot Stampers are only, or even usually, original pressings.

In our most recent shootout, the second-best sounding pressing was on the early Black Label. We would love to give out the stampers for that one, but we don’t do that.

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