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Many audiophiles are inclined to believe the conventional wisdom they receive from like-minded enthusiasts.

Some of it is right, some of it is wrong, but if you don’t know how to critically listen to records for yourself, you will never be able to tell which is which.

You’ll be stuck with the approaches most audiophiles use — guessing and assuming. Neither are a reliable method for getting to the truth.

The Wrong Early Pressings of Mad Dogs and Englishmen Have Horrendous Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

If you get the wrong stampers on this record, you will discover, as we did, that it’s clearly been mastered from a badly made dub. The “cassette-like” sound quality will not be hard to recognize. If you have stumbled onto one of those pressings, give up on it and try your luck elsewhere, making sure to note the bad stampers.

Most copies have a tendency to get smeary and congested when loud.

Listen for good transients and not too much compression.

Most copies are opaque, as well as dull up top; try to find the ones with some degree of transparency and as much top end extension as you can (the percussion will be helped most of all by the extended top).

And of course you need to find a copy that rocks, as this is a definitely a Rock Concert, although what it most reminds me of is Ray Charles doing a choice set of modern classics, mixing it up by off-handedly mixing in a few of his own. See how they all fit together? That’s how the pros do it. (The main pro in this case is Leon Russell, the mastermind of the whole operation. He clearly knows what he is doing.)

All tracks were selected and mixed by none other than the legendary Glyn Johns.

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Could This Be the Sound Audiophiles Complain About with Vintage Pressings?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Red Garland Available Now

A rare and expensive (!) early stereo pressing that we played in a recent shootout for Bright and Breezy was passable at best.

As you can see from the notes reproduced below, we found the sound to be “sweet, relaxed, but badly veiled and lacking weight and bass.” (Note that records without a 1.5+ grade or better on both sides are not considered Hot Stamper pressings.)

In other words, it sounded too much like an old record, and not a very good one at that. The world is full of them. (For this album, clearly the best sound is found on the right OJC.)

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Thick as a Brick Marked a Milestone in 2007

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Until about 2007, Thick as a Brick was the undiscovered gem (by me anyway) in the Tull catalog. The pressings we’d heard up until then were nothing special, and of course the average pressing of this album is exactly that: no great shakes.

With the advent of better record cleaning fluids and much better tables, phono stages, room treatments and the like — taking full advantage of the remarkable number of revolutions in audio that have occurred over the last two or three decades –some copies of Thick As A Brick have shown themselves to be truly amazing sounding. Even the All Music Guide could hear how well-engineered the album was.

Marking Two Milestones from the Past

The 2007 commentary you see below discusses the pros and cons of both the British and Domestic original pressings. With continuing improvements to the system, room, etc., it would not be long before we realized that the British pressings were simply not competitive with the best domestic ones.

You might say this record helped us mark two important milestones in the developing history of Better Records.

The first, around 2007, was recognized by the fact that we had improved our playback to a very high level, one high enough to reproduce the album with all the clarity, size and energy we were shocked to hear at the time.

The second milestone would result from the audio changes we continued to make for the next couple of years, from 2007 to 2010, which allowed us to recognize that the best British pressings, as good as they might be, were not in the same league as the best domestic ones. We broke down in detail exactly what we were listening for and what were hearing in this commentary, and the Brits were clearly not cutting it at the highest levels by 2010.

If you find yourself with one of more British copies of the album that you think have superior sound — any copies of the album, really — we would love to send you one of our Hot Stampers so you can hear what you are missing.

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You Say Your Shaded Dog Just Sounds Like an Old Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

The better pressings of LSC 2328 have some of the best sound we have ever heard for The Nutcracker. We’ve played recordings of the work by the dozens, on the greatest Golden Age labels of all time, including the likes of Mercury, RCA and London. (Our current favorites of both the suites and the complete ballet are those conducted by Ansermet for Decca.)

The CSO, as one might expect, plays this work with more precision and control than most others. They also bring more excitement and dynamic contrasts to their performance, adding greatly to our enjoyment of the music.

Some may find the performances a bit rushed. That was our experience during our most recent shootout.

But skip 9s/6s. We had two copies and both of them sounded too much like an old record.

Pressings with those stampers might be passable, even to some degree enjoyable, especially when played on an old school system, but they would not be worth bothering with on the high quality modern equipment we use.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with a catalog of obvious shortcomings — obvious to us but not necessarily to others — and we’ve broken them down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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Always wanted to have a Plum and Orange pressing? Here’s your chance!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We should have titled this one “here was your chance” since this pressing sold very quickly.

Over the years most Plum and Orange pressings were disposed of by us on ebay for the benefit of collectors and those audiophiles who might be ill-informed enough to think that early British pressings would have the best sound for Led Zeppelin III.

They do not. They can, however, sound reasonably good in some cases with the proper cleaning.

However, they are not even Double Plus (A++) good, which sounds like something from the novel 1984 but is in fact a Very Good grade and guaranteed to trounce any and all copies of the album you have ever heard.

No, the best Zeppelin album we have played to date with the early label in this case earned a grade of Single Plus to Double Plus, which we describe as “[a] wonderful sounding side with many impressive qualities, notably better than a Single Plus copy. A big step up from the typical pressing.”

UPDATE:

We do not even offer Single Plus copies on the site anymore. Although their faults would be less obvious to anyone who went through the shootout process with the album, such faults are much too bothersome to us precisely because we did go through that process.

Once you know what is right, it’s very easy to spot what is wrong.

This is the foundational principle of Hot Stampers.

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In 2008 We Discovered the Best Sound for this Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

In the early 2000’s we auditioned an amazing sounding cheap reissue pressing of this album. By 2008 we finally had enough copies to do a shootout.

The fact that we were not able to find a copy with two killer sides tells me a few different things about what may or may not have been true at the time. (2008 was early days in the world of Hot Stamper shootouts.)

One, that we may not have had a big enough pile of copies to play. This is before Discogs made it easy to find a record like this, so chancing upon copies locally was very much a hit or miss deal, or

Two, we couldn’t clean them as well as we can now, or

Three, we couldn’t play them as well as we can now, or

Four, some or all of the above, to one degree or another. (This is of course how audio works, which, for those of us who have been in it for a long time, is best described as mysteriously.)

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Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary has been updated multiple times, most recently in 2025.

British band, British pressing… right?

Nope. It’s just another mistaken idea.

We evaluated an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last.

The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played.

We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)

Just saw this today (11/29/2021)

On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:

So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko

Not sure what those two commas are doing there. Pausing for emphasis? Sure, why not? This is a big deal.

Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is truly one of the greats.

Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He might be, or at least he might choose to describe himself as one.

Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.

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What Are the Best Stampers for Led Zeppelin’s Albums?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

What are the best sounding stampers for Led Zeppelin’s albums?

As if we would tell you!

This is a reworked excerpt from a much longer piece entitled record collecting for audiophiles – the limits of expert advice

In it we discussed the various stampers for some of Led Zeppelin’s albums and what role they play in our Hot Stamper shootouts.

Please to enjoy.

There is no way to know whether a record is any good without playing it, early stamper, late stamper or any other stamper.

First pressings (A, 1A, A1) don’t always win shootouts.

If they did we would simply buy only first pressings with those early stampers and only sell copies with those early stampers, since they are the best.

But this ignores the inconvenient fact that a great many other things go into the production of a record that have nothing to do with how early the stamper is.

A single copy of an album with stampers numbered (or lettered) A, when compared to B, when compared to C, has no definitive meaning for stampers A, B, C, or any others, because of the tremendous variation in the sound of all the pressings with A,B,C and other stampers.

Example Number One

There is a hot stamper for a certain Zep album that always wins the shootouts, [redacted].

It beats the hell out of the early stampers, A and B. In fact, we don’t even go after A and B anymore because they are expensive and rarely sound good enough to recoup our investment of the time and money we would spend buying, cleaning and auditioning them in a shootout.

A and B can be good, but why pay top dollar for them when they have never been any better than “good?”

We’re looking for “great” so that we can charge a premium price for them. This accomplishes three things that are obviously of great importance to any business:

  1. It pleases the hell out of our customers.
  2. It covers our costs, and
  3. It lets us pay our staff good wages and bonuses for their hard work, skill and knowledge.

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RCA Produced this Amazing Budget Reissue in 1976

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

This review was written in 2011 shortly after our first Hot Stamper shootout for the work.

It still holds up though — I wouldn’t change a thing, other than to add a few links to help audiophiles and record collectors gain a better understanding of the shortcomings of received wisdom when it comes to finding that small subset of pressings capable of offering significantly higher sound quality.

Conventional record collector thinking generally works fine most of the time, but Monteux’s recording of the 6th Symphony in 1955 is a good example of the standard advice for finding better pressings turning out to be completely wrong.

For more on this subject, including the solution we came up with to fix the problem, click here.

Our Original Review

Presenting a first for Better Records: a White Hot Stamper copy of this CORRECTLY remastered version of LSC 1901, which just happens to be a recording from the earliest days of stereo, 1955! It’s guaranteed to KILL any and all original Shaded Dogs, as well as the more common reissues; White Dogs, Red Seals, Victrolas, Classic Heavy Vinyl, you name it, this pressing will beat the pants off of it and in the process show you precisely what is wrong with each and every one of them.

Over the past twenty years we’ve played hundreds of early RCAs and we have sure never heard one sound like this, with so much richness, Tubey Magic, LIFE and CLARITY.

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There’s a Very Good Chance We Were Wrong about Mulligan Meets Getz

More of the Music of Stan Getz /More of the Music of Gerry Mulligan

This is an album that we were probably wrong about in 2021 when the following Hot Stamper two-pak pressing went up for sale on the site. (The pressings we liked at the time are long gone by now.) Here is what we wrote back then:

Mulligan and Getz’s 1957 collaboration arrives on the site with this superb 2-pack offering Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner

Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory

Practically impossible to find in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces – it took two different pressings to get two good sides, and they are very good indeed

The reissues we discovered in 2025 trounced the originals (in both stereo and mono) as well as the early reissues (on the Verve T Label) we played in our shootout, as you can see from the stamper sheet notes below:

Our mistaken judgment is simply the result of ignorance. In 2021 we simply had no idea just how good this recording could sound on vintage vinyl. We hadn’t done our homework properly, and because of that we came up with the wrong answer.

We only discovered the right pressings, with the right stampers, pressed in the right era, and mastered by the right guy, sometime in 2024 or so. We bought a bunch of those and in 2025 did the shootout with all kinds of copies, just to keep everybody honest.

That was the year much better sounding reissue copies that look like the one you see on the left came along. As we noted in the listing:

  • Leave it to Better Records to figure out a complicated title with a long history such as this one – originals, reissues, monos, stereos, we had to play them all to find a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory.

Some quick notes:

Bowtie Label Stereo

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