Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles for Sale Album
UPDATE 2026
Sometime before 2022 we played a copy of Beatles For Sale on the original label that earned Super Hot Stamper (2+) grades on both sides. This was surprising because we rarely like Beatles albums on the early label with the exception of two titles, Yellow Sub and A Collection of Oldies…
UPDATE: 2022
We just played another original pressing of For Sale and this copy had a Triple Plus (A+++) side one, mated to a Double Plus (A++) side two. For Sale is still the only studio album with top quality sound on the original pressing that we have ever played, but now we can say with some authority that if you have a bunch of originals, you might just have one with killer sound like the one we had. There was a later pressing that also earned our top grade, a subject we touch on in this commentary for Kind of Blue.
UPDATE to the UPDATE: 2023
We’ve just played another original pressing of For Sale in a shootout and amazingly it earned Triple Plus (A+++) grades for its sound on both sides. Most original Beatles pressings on the early label do not even qualify to make it into our shootouts. Their mastering is so crude, congested and distorted that the sound simply cannot be taken seriously on a modern hi-fi rig. On a jukebox, maybe. Mine’s in the shop.
Note that this label information, like most label information, is not as helpful as it might seem. The Yellow and Black Parlophone label was used in the UK all the way up until 1969, during which time a lot of copies of For Sale, first released in 1964, were sold. In other words, if you want to find a great sounding pressing of For Sale on the early label, you have your work cut out for you.
This finding about For Sale is precisely why live and learn is our motto.
We don’t know it all, and we’ve never claimed that we did. We constantly learn things about pressings in our daily shootouts. That should not be too surprising, as record shootouts are the only way to learn anything about the sound of records that’s actually worth knowing.
Start doing your own experiments and your record knowledge might just take off the way ours has. 99% of what we think we know about the sound of records we’ve learned in shootouts over the course of the last twenty years.
We are happy to share our advice with you on getting started.
Before this, the only Beatles record we would sell on the Yellow and Black Parlophone label was A Collection of Oldies… But Goldies. That title does have the best sound on the early label. In numerous shootouts, no Black and Silver label pressing from the ’70s was competitive with the best stereo copies made in the ’60s.
Until now, it was clearly the exception to our rule. From With the Beatles up through Yellow Submarine, the best sounding Beatles pressings would always be found on the best reissue pressings.
Here are the notes for the best sounding For Sale on the early label we played in our 2022 shootout.
For those who have trouble reading our writing, the notes say:
Side One
- Track one is clear enough, a bit recessed.
- Track two is clear, open and lively, with good space, but not as weighty as the best.
Side Two
- Track one is relaxed, solid and musical, with good size.
- Track two is full, solid and musical, with good bass.
We Was Wrong
A very good sounding record, with few of the problems we heard on the other early label Beatles pressings we’ve played in the past. Most of them had the kind of old record sound — compressed, congested, harmonically distorted, bandwidth limited, etc. — that kept them from making the cut.
But that’s the reason to play records, not judge them by their labels, right? How else would you possibly learn anything about their sound? And you have to play them head to head against other copies, a normally crude process we’ve refined over the last twenty years into a science we like to call the Hot Stamper shootout.
