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One of Our Best Sounding Pressings of Revolver Lacked Space on One Side

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

On side one we played I’m Only Sleeping first, followed by Taxman.

On side two we started with And Your Bird Can Sing, followed by Good Day Sunshine.

You may notice that there seems to be a pattern in the way we pick which songs of each side to do first.

As you can see from the notes, side two of our most recent White Hot stamper Shootout Winner was doing everything right.

The second track was very tubey and present. Good Day Sunshine, the first track, was super rich and weighty, with lots of room around the vox. (I hope you can read our writing. If you can’t, just email me and I will try to find the time to transcribe the rest of the text.)

However, we had a side one that was slightly better than the side one you see here.

The Second Round

When we played the two best copies back to back, side two of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+, but the side one of another pressing showed us there was even more space in the recording than we noticed the first time around.

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What the Shootout Winning Copies of A Hard Day’s Night Really Get Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

I wrote this bit of commentary about twenty years ago:

When comparing pressings of this record, the copies that get their voices to sound both present and warm, smooth, and sweet, especially during the harmonies, are always the best.  All the other instruments seem to fall in line when the vocals are correct. This is an old truism — it’s all about the midrange — but in the case of A Hard Day’s Night, it really is true.

Now that we are putting our unredacted (!) shootout notes on the blog for everyone to see, here are the actual notes for the shootout winning pressing we just played (6/2025), notes that back up what we said so many years ago 100%.

What’s does this amazing side one sound like?

  • Very full guitars and vocals for this
  • Less glare
  • More midrange energy
  • Breathy and full vocals
  • Pretty rich and focussed
  • The fullest, most present and breathy vocals

And this amazing side two?

  • Much fuller vocals and drums
  • Great energy
  • Most “tubey” yet
  • Gets very big
  • Fullest and warmest yet
  • Not edgy

Both sides had qualities that did much to set them apart, coupled with fewer of the shortcomings we found in practically all the other pressings we played.

Less glary and less edgy are critical to the better pressings, simply because few copies are not glary and edgy in the midrange to some degree.

But the real keys to the shootout winners are vocals that are full, present, warm and breathy.

For The Beatles in 1964, nothing else about the sound of their recordings could possibly compete with those four qualities.

We could add two more. Energy would probably be the next most important one, followed by Tubey Magic.

That brings the total of most important qualities to a grand total six.

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It’s the Rare Yellow Submarine that Sounds Anything Like This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Here is how we described our best copy of Yellow Submarine from the last shootout:

Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage UK copy could not be beat.

Without a doubt the hardest single side of any Beatles album to find with good sound is side two of Yellow Submarine, and here’s a copy that is as good as it gets.

The only place to find the all-time classic “Hey Bulldog,” as well as “All Together Now” and “It’s All Too Much.” In addition, “All You Need Is Love” debuted in a true stereo mix on this album.

My favorite lines from the notes for the notoriously difficult-to-get-to-sound right side two:

  • Big and clear and 3-D for this
  • Nice string texture — sweet and rich for once

You do the best you can with what you have to work with, and normally side two of this album does not give you much to work with, as most copies are thin sounding and have screechy strings.

One or two out of ten copies — and of course we are only talking about the real vintage UK pressings, nothing else is worth bothering with — will get the strings right on side two. That makes side two a good test for string tone in our book, especially for those of you who don’t have any of our Hot Stamper orchestral pressings.

This is a very difficult album to find good sound for; many pressings are almost unbearably gritty and harsh. Fortunately, these two sides have no such problems. The overall tonality is rich and full-bodied, and there’s plenty of presence and energy as well.

A Tough Title to Play

Side two of this recording, the orchestral side, ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

It took us a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be, involving many of the revolutionary changes in audio we discuss at great length on the blog.

As we’ve said before about these kinds of recordings, they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees. If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the home audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles neglect).

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