con-wis

Many audiophiles are inclined to believe the conventional wisdom they receive from other 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 at the truth.

An Overview of Beatles Oldies But Goldies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is a Beatles album we think we know well.

We’ve done a number of shootouts for A Collection of Beatles Oldies over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the sound of the originals vis-a-vis the reissues:

  1. The best of the early pressings always win our shootouts. No reissue has ever earned our top grade of A+++ and it is unlikely any reissue ever will.
  2. The reissues can be quite good however. The best of them have earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
  3. The worst of the early pressings also earned grades of Double Plus (A++).
  4. Conclusion: if you have a bad original and a good reissue, you might be fooled into thinking the sound quality was comparable.

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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 by us of 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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Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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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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clone me Shaded Dog Stampers to Avoid on XXX passable sheet 1+

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Even though they had the Shaded Dog label, some of the later stampers for this record were not very good sounding compared to the ones that won our shootouts.

15s on side one earned a grade that would prevent it from being sold as a Hot Stamper pressing. There was no reason to play side two (13s) since side one eliminated this copy from the competition.

The 1+ grade found on this side one means it’s simply not very good, Shaded Dog label or no Shaded Dog label.

Pressings with these 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.

In this case, the conventional wisdom that the original pressings will most likely have superior sound to the later-numbered copies turns out to be right.

The average Shaded Dog may be better than the average classical record, but that certainly doesn’t mean it has any claim to audiophile sound. We’ve played bad early RCA pressings by the hundreds. Now, finally, with this blog we can point some of them out to those record lovers who are more interested in top quality sound than an original label.

For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

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Straight Up – Porky Not So Prime Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now

UPDATE 2026

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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