Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This commentary has to be close to twenty years old by now.
Both can be good. I did the shootout and often tried to guess the label for the copy I was hearing, for fun more than anything else. I have to admit that my batting average was not much better than chance.
The 360s tend to be a little fuller and smearier, but plenty of red label copies sound that way and some 360s don’t, so trying to match the sound to the label was even more pointless than usual.
When comparing pressings in a shootout it’s too late for the label to have any predictive value.
We’ve already bought the records, cleaned them up and now just want to know what they actually sound like — not which ones might be the best, but which ones are the best.
The time for guessing games has passed. Of course, if we do actually figure out what the right stampers are, this helps us next time around.