More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook
That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.
Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)
This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different then. A few dozen had been done since 2004, and probably not nearly as well as we thought at the time, truth be told.
A while back one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few really amazing sounding direct discs that contains music actually worth listening to. Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers.
Hot Stamper pressings are almost always going to be studio multi-track recordings, not direct to discs of live performances.
They will invariably suffer many compromises compared to the purist approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate sources of distortion in the pursuit of the highest fidelity.
But when they do that, they almost always fail. How many Direct Discs sound like that Glenn Miller? A dozen at most. The vast majority are just plain awful. I know, I’ve played practically every one ever made. For more than a decade I made a living selling them.
Thankfully that is no longer the case, although we do have a handful of direct discs that we still do shootouts for, such as The Three, Glenn Miller, Straight from the Heart and the odd Sheffield.
Compromised Recordings
What we do play is those very special, albeit compromised, mass-produced pressings. The right Londons and Shaded Dogs. Columbia and Contemporary jazz. Brewer and Shipley. Sergio Mendes. The Beatles. The Doobie Brothers for Pete’s sake!
Why? Because those pressings actually communicate the music. They allow you to forget about the recording and just listen. You can’t do that very often with the CD of the album. You can’t even do it with most of the vinyl pressings you run into. You certainly can’t do it with the vast majority of 180 gram LPs being made today, not in our experience anyway.
You have to have the right pressing. That’s what a Hot Stamper is: more than anything else, it’s the right pressing.
It’s the one that really lets the music come through, regardless of whatever compromises were made along the way.