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Stan Ricker’s Fingers Are All Over these Paintings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Guitar Recordings Available Now

We have been planning on doing a shootout for this Earl Klugh’s 1977 Blue Note release, Finger Paintings, for more than a year, and over that time we were fortunate enough to pick up a MoFi pressing of the album locally for the very reasonable price of ten bucks. (The price tag on the jacket is visible at the bottom of this post.)

The notes for our 2025 Shootout Winner included phrases such as “huge, weighty and punchy, ” along with “natural, rich and sweet.” Most copies may not have those qualities, but the best ones sure do.

Contrast that with the Mobile Fidelity pressing that Stan Ricker mastered in 1980. It was one of their biggest early sellers, and one that they no doubt felt had such good sound that it would be sure to sell at triple the price of the regular Mobile Fidelity pressing!

WTF you say? Yes, it would be released in 1981 in a box (not a box set!) as a Numbered, Limited Edition, Ultra High Quality Record (UHQR) at the retail price of $50. $178 in 2026 dollars, if you can believe that records used to cost that kind of dough (cough).

OK, that’s all well and good, but this is supposed to be a blog for audiophiles, so forget all that history stuff and just tell us what the record sounds like.

Fair enough. After having played a big batch of standard issue pressings and getting to know the sound of the record well, feast your eyes on the notes we took.

This MoFi may actually set a new standard for screwing up a perfectly good sounding record. (I was going to say tape but I have never heard the tape and have no idea what it sounds like. John Golden (JG) at Kendun cut the originals. Maybe he was able to somehow make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The possibility exists.)

Side One

Track Four

  • Really sucked out and clean
  • How bizarrely awful!

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We Don’t Offer Domestic Pressings of Pour Down Like Silver for One Very Simple Reason

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Thompson Available Now

In spite of the fact that the domestic pressings of this Richard and Linda Thompson classic from 1974 were mastered by the likes of Kendun and Sterling — two of the greatest mastering houses of all time, — they have never impressed us with their sound quality.

The biggest problems with this record would be obvious to even the casual listener: gritty, spitty vocals; lack of richness; bright tonality; lack of bass; no real space or transparency, etc.

The domestic Island pressings did not do nearly as well in our shootout as the best Island imports, no surprise there as the early UK records were mastered by one of our favorite engineers.

Avoid the Carthage pressings mastered by Sterling. They came in last in our shootout.

The domestic breakdown follows:

Black Island Domestic #1

  • Tubey but hot and spitty.

Black Island Domestic #2

  • Flat, dry and hot (glary or bright)

Carthage Domestic recut from 1983, Sterling on both sides

  • So sandy and lean! They really wanted to add some top end (!)

Defending the Indefensible

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If Only I Could Remember My Name – Another in a Long Line of Classic Records’ Mediocrities

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?

On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:

  • Noticeably more warmth,
  • Noticeably more sweetness,
  • Noticeably more delicacy,
  • Noticeably more transparency,
  • Noticeably more ambience,
  • Noticeably more energy,
  • Noticeably more size (width and height),
  • Noticeably more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).

in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.

The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.

A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.

By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.

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How Do the Early Pressings of The Poll Winners Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

A recent Shootout Winning copy with the early stereo badge cover was described this way:

Stunning sound throughout this vintage Black Label Stereo Records pressing, with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them

Roy DuNann always seems to get the real sound out of the sessions he recorded – amazingly realistic drums in a big room; Tubey Magical guitar tone; deep, note-like bass, and on and on

4 1/2 stars: “The choice of material, the interplay between the three players, and the lead work all meld together beautifully on The Poll Winners, making it a classic guitar album in a small-group setting.”

Musically, all true. Sonically, not so much. The early D1/D2 stampers on the early Black Label might be passable on side one (1+), but side two was just a mess (NFG).

Side One

Track Two

  • A bit bright and flat

Track One

  • Very clear but lacking richness, weight and depth
  • Thin, and bright up top
  • 1+

Side Two

Track One

  • Narrow stereo field
  • Weird tape hiss
  • Metallic top end
  • Very recessed and weird
  • Nope

A different Stereo Badge Cover copy sporting a Black Label won the shootout by the way. Go figure.

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Waiting For Columbus Gets the Bernie Treatment Care of Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

A Hot Stamper pressing of this amazing sounding album, a title we regret to say we have in stock only rarely, might be described this way:

Some of the best sounding live rock and roll sound you will ever hear outside of a concert venue. If you want to understand the unique appeal of the band, there’s no better place to start than right here.

It’s one of our all-time favorite live recordings and their single best release – a true Masterpiece.

I have lately been listening to this album in its entirety at the gym (playing the standard cassette over headphones) and enjoying the hell out of it. As good as their best studio albums are, and I count myself as big a fan of the band as there is, Waiting for Columbus is surely the pinnacle of their recorded output. It is as close to perfect as any live album I know.

(The Last Record Album is my personal favorite of their studio albums, but since nobody seems to want to buy it at the prices we charge, I regret to say we had to stop doing shootouts for it years ago. We were losing too much money that way.)

But Bernie Grundman’s version is just another one in a very long line of disastrous recuts, the kind of crap he has been churning out for the last thirty years. It’s all but unplayable on modern high quality equipment. (If it’s not on your system, you might consideer the idea that you still have plenty of work left to do, audio-wise.)

As you can see from the notes below, record one may be passable, but record two is NFG. How is it possible to turn such a wonderful recording into such a ridiculously bad sounding pressing? Even Mobile Fidelity did a better job with the album, and they’re one of the most incompetent remastering outfits that the audiophile world has even known.

We’re frankly at a loss to understand any of it.Bernie Grundman used to make good sounding records. We know that for a fact, having played them by the hundreds. Apparently those days are gone, and, based on this album and plenty of others, there is very little chance of them returning.

Notes on the Sound

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The Alan Parsons Project – A MoFi Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons Available Now

MoFi Regular LP: F / UHQR: D 

Two — count ’em, two — hall of shame pressings and two more MoFi Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile LPs reviewed and found wanting.

The MoFi is a textbook example of their ridiculous affinity for boosting the top end, not to mention the extra kick they like to put in the kick drum, great for mid-fi (sometimes known around these parts as stone age audio systems) but a serious distraction on a high end stereo with good low end reproduction.

If you like the album –and that’s a big if, I myself have never been able to take it seriously — try the Simply Vinyl or the Classic LP.

Even the UHQR sucks. Don’t kid yourself. They’re still mastered by Stan Ricker, and he likes plenty of top end.

Like the old saying goes, if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing.

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Sgt. Pepper’s and Mistaken Audiophile Thinking (Hint: the UHQR Is Wrong)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

This commentary was probably written between 2005 when we did our first shootout for the album and 2008, by which time it would have been a regular feature on the site. 

We charge hundreds of dollars for a Hot Stamper Sgt. Pepper, which is a lot to pay for a record. But consider this: the UHQR typically sells for a great deal more than the price we charge and doesn’t sound remotely as good. 

Of course the people that buy UHQRs would never find themselves in a position to recognize how much better one of our Hot Stampers sounds in a head to head shootout with their precious and oh-so-collectible UHQR.

They assume that they’ve already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and see no reason to try another.

I was guilty of the same mistaken audiophile thinking myself in 1982. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper and thinking how amazing it sounded and how lucky I was to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now it most likely would be positively painful. All I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice), and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard really good copies of Sgt. Pepper, like the wonderful Hot Stampers we put on the site from time to time, now the MoFi UHQR sounds so phony to me that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

UPDATE 2025

If you are still buying these remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.

At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is lacking on your copy of the album.

And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go to our Half-Speed mastering main page .

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We Was Wrong About The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (Circa 1985-90)

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is a very old and somewhat embarrassing commentary about how ridiculously wrong we were about which are the best sounding German pressings of the Magical Mystery Tour.

Today we would never consider selling a record that sounds as phony as this version of the album does, but we did back in the 90s and probably as late as the 2000s.

Bad sounding records I once liked are common enough on the blog to have their own category, with 76 entries to date. If we had the time to make listings for them, there would surely be hundreds of others. If you’ve been in the audio game for as long as we have, you should have plenty of records that fit that bill. All those old records sitting on the shelves that you haven’t played in years might not sound they way you remember them, but the only way to know that is to pull them out and play them. If you’ve been making regular audio progress, most of them should sound better than ever, but there have to be plenty that won’t. You just don’t know which are which as long as they sit on the shelf.

This German pressing has sound that is dramatically different from that found on other Hot Stamper pressings of MMT we’ve had on the site. I used to be convinced that its sound was clearly superior to the regular German MMT LPs.

Back in the late 80s and into the 90s this was the pressing that I was certain blew them all out of the water.

We know better now. We call this version the “Too Hot” Stamper pressing — the upper mids and top end are much too boosted to be enjoyable on top quality equipment.

It does have some positive qualities though. It has substantially deeper bass than any other version; in fact, it has some of the deepest bass you will ever hear on a pop recording. It can literally rattle the room when Paul goes down deep on Baby You’re A Rich Man.

It also uses a slightly different mix on some tracks and is mastered differently in terms of levels. The level change is most obvious at the beginning of Strawberry Fields, where it starts out very quietly and gets louder after a short while, unlike all other versions which start out pretty much at the same level.

The effect is pleasing, you might even say powerful, but probably not what The Beatles intended, as no other copy I’ve ever heard makes use of the same quiet opening. An unknown mastering engineer made the choice, he created a new sound for the song, probably because he didn’t like all the tape hiss at the opening, during which few instruments were playing loud enough to mask it.

With this mix the record is now more of a Hi-Fi spectacular — great for waking up sleepy stereo systems but not the last word in natural sound.

Records that are boosted on the top and bottom suffer from what we like to call the smile curve. This pressing, as well as lots of records remastered to appeal to audiophiles, have a bad case of it.

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Universals’s Reissue of 10cc’s Masterpiece – Is Anyone in Charge Here?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

This review was written circa 2005.

This Universal Super De Luxe import LP appears to be the regular vinyl version that, for all we know, might actually still be in print in Europe. It appears to have been specially pressed on heavy vinyl for our domestic market as part of the new Universal Heavy Vinyl series.

Either that or it’s being made from the old metalwork for the LP that would have been available most recently in Europe (and out of print by now I should think).

Which is a very long-winded way of saying that it is not in any real sense remastered, if such a claim is actually being made for it, or the series.

Rather it has simply been repressed on Heavy Vinyl in Europe and imported to the states.

None of which is either here nor there because the record is an absolute DISASTER.

The top end is so boosted, after the cutter-head-emphasis gets done with it all that’s left is pure DISTORTION. No one with two working ears and even a halfway-decent stereo can fail to notice how awful this pressing sounds. How a record this poorly mastered (or pressed, perhaps it’s a manufacturing defect) could get through the Quality Control department at Universal is beyond me.

Wait a minute. Who say they even have a quality control department? 

They, like every other company that produces records these days, could apparently not care less whether the records they make are any good or not. There is not an iota of evidence to support the contention that anyone at any of these companies knows what the hell he or she is doing.

This is a classic example of a phrase that is widely misused, that phrase being “begging the question,” which typically refers to assuming something that one should be required to prove.

If you assume that any modern record label had a quality control department, you should be required to provide evidence of its existence. I am not aware of any.

Oh, but it’s ANALOG.

Folks, take it from me: because it’s on vinyl, heavy or otherwise, doesn’t have a whole lot to do with whether it sounds any good or not. The Hoffman-mastered DCC Gold CD is a million times more analog sounding than this piece of crap. Unlike this LP, the tonality of his CD is right on the money. It’s still a CD, and the Hot Stamper pressings we sell will trounce it sonically, but it’s worlds better than this Analog Vinyl.

If any record ever deserved a failing grade, it’s this one. After a few minutes you simply will not be able to be in the same room with it.

This link will take you to some other exceptionally bad records that, like this one, were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. On today’s modern systems, it should be obvious that they have nothing of the kind and that, in fact, the opposite is true.

On Barney Kessel’s Easy Like, Stick With the Earlier Contemporary Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

The Shootout Winning pressing we played in 2024 was yet another killer Barney Kessel recording from the Golden Age of Tube Recording:

Both sides of this vintage Contemporary pressing were giving us the rich, sweet and tubey MONO sound we were looking for, earning INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them

Roy DuNann (at the console on select tracks, with Val Valentin handling engineering duties on the others) always seems to get phenomenally good sound out of the sessions he recorded – amazingly realistic drums in a big room; Tubey Magical guitar tone; deep, note-like string bass, and on and on

For some reason, the guitar sound from this era of All Tube Chain Recording seems to have died out with the times – it can only be found on the best of these vintage pressings, and, as you may imagine, the better the guitar sounds, the more likely it is that the record will win our shootout

If you don’t have an electric guitar jazz record with this kind of off-the-charts Tubey Magical sound, maybe it’s time you got one

You would never know how good the recording was by playing this D14/D9 pressing on the original label.

The sound was hollow and dry with a boosted top end. The 1+ grade awarded to this side two means it’s simply not that good, early label or no early label.

This Is Why

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.

We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.

I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them.

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