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.