A Milestone Event in the History of Better Records
Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now
The discussion below, brought about by a Hot Stamper shootout we conducted for Revolver quite a number of years ago (2007!), touches on many issues near and dear to us here at Better Records.
Some of the things we learned about Revolver all those years ago are important to our Hot Stamper shootouts to this very day, including, but not limited to:
- Pressing variations,
- System upgrades,
- Dead wax secrets,
and the quality we prize most in a recording:
- LIFE, or, if you prefer, Energy.
At the end of the commentary we of course take the opportunity to bash the MoFi pressing of the album, a regular feature of our Beatles Hot Stamper shootouts. We’re not saying the MoFi Beatles records are bad; in the overall scheme of things they are mostly pretty decent. What we are saying is that, with our help, you can do a helluva lot better.
Our help doesn’t come cheap, as anyone on our mailing list will tell you. You may have to pay a lot, but we think you get what you pay for, and we gladly back up that claim with a 100% money back guarantee for every Hot Stamper pressing we sell.
The Story of Revolver, Dateline October 2007
(Incidentally, 2007 turns out to have been a milestone year for us here at Better Records.)
White Hot Stampers for Revolver are finally HERE! Let the celebrations begin! Seriously, this is a very special day for us here at Better Records. The Toughest Nut to Crack in the Beatles’ catalog has officially been cracked. Yowza!
Presenting the first TRULY AWESOME copy of Revolver to ever make it to the site. There’s a good reason why Hot Stamper shootouts for practically every other Beatles album have already been done, most of them many times over, and it is simply this: finding good sounding copies of Revolver is almost IMPOSSIBLE. The typical British Parlophone or Apple pressing, as well as every German, Japanese and domestic LP we’ve played in the last year or two just plain sucked. Where was the analog magic we heard in the albums before and after, the rapturously wonderful sound that’s all over our Hot Stamper Rubber Souls and Sgt. Peppers? How could Revolver go so horribly off the rails for no apparent reason?
We’ve been asking ourselves these very same questions for years. No amount of cleaning seemed to be able to bring out the sweetness and Tubey Magical qualities we heard in the rest of The Beatles catalog. There was a gritty, opaque flatness to copy after copy of Revolver that wouldn’t go away no matter what we did.
Little by little over the course of the last year things began to change.
- We came up with a number of much more sophisticated and advanced cleaning techniques (which we talk about here).
- The ruler-flat, super-clean and clear Dynavector 17d replaced the more forgiving, less accurate 20x.
- The EAR 324 we acquired at the beginning of 2007 was a BIG step up over the 834p in terms of resolution and freedom from distortion and coloration.
- And the third pair of Hallographs had much the same effect, taking out the room distortions that compromise transparency and three-dimensionality.
A big studio opened up between the speakers that had only been hinted at on Revolver in the past.
With the implementation of a number of other seemingly insignificant tweaks, each of which made a subtle but recognizable improvement, the cumulative effect of all of the above was now clearly making a difference. The combination of so many improvements was nothing less than dramatic. Revolver was finally coming to life.