Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
This review is a window into our limited understanding of Abbey Road on vinyl in 2007.
Let’s just say we have learned a lot about the album since then, mostly through better playback and cleaning, but also because we’ve played roughly one hundred more pressings since then, having done shootouts for the album by the dozens.
These regularly-held shootouts are the only thing that has taught us what we think we know.
Looking back, 2007 seems to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records, although we certainly did not know that at the time.
Later that same year we swore off Heavy Vinyl (prompted by the mediocre sound of the Rhino pressing of Blue) and committed ourselves to doing record shootouts of vintage pressings full time.
Much of the review you see below indicates we had a much more limited understanding of Abbey Road than we do now, but we obviously have no problem admitting to it, a subject we discussed in some detail here.
Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. (“Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community. If you want to avoid the worst of them, we are happy to help you do that.)
Our Review from 2007
This Minty Apple British Import pressing has MASTER TAPE SOUND ON SIDE ONE! We just finished a big Abbey Road shootout (1/16/07) and this side one was IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN!
This is the first Hot Stamper Abbey Road we’ve ever listed … and there’s a good reason for that. It’s practically impossible to find a properly mastered copy. For whatever reasons — probably because this recording is so complicated and required so many tracks — Abbey Road is the toughest nut to crack in the Beatles’ catalog.
This copy is actually my personal Ref Copy, which I have had in my collection for many years. Surprisingly, while doing this shootout we discovered that it doesn’t have the ultimate side two, which is the side I really liked on this copy. It still merits an A+ for side two, but it’s interesting that one of the things that we often discover in these shootouts is copies that exceed our expectations and set entirely new standards for albums we’ve been listening to critically for decades.
This copy turned out to have the Ultimate Side One — A+++. No other copy came close; it’s two full grades above the next best pressing.
Frankly, up to now we’ve been afraid to take on Abbey Road. With recent improvements to the stereo, and knowing that I had at least one superb sounding copy, now was the time. Out of all the imports I’ve been collecting over the last dozen years or so, only three or four copies really qualified as having Hot Stampers.