customer-shootout

Letters from customers who did their own shootouts using one of our Hot Stamper pressings.

Letter of the Week – “The second-best place to have a stack of Better Records is on your friend’s shelf.”

Phenomenally Good Sounding White Hot Stamper Pressings Available Now

Dear Tom,

Yesterday I got to have an experience I’ll bet very few people – apart from you and your staff, of course – have ever had: a White Hot Stamper shootout!

My buddies David and Bill have amassed themselves quite a collection of Better Records, and among us, we now have multiple WHSs of the same titles. What an incredible bounty. Also, we’ve all copied your stereo, with Robert’s guidance and fine-tuning, to the best of our abilities. This allows us to do some dead-serious listening and comparing.

What did I learn? First, you are rock-solid reliable. A White Hot Stamper is a White Hot Stamper. They are all simply incredible sounding records.

Which leads me to rule #2: No two records sound the same. Yes, that even goes for white hot stampers. One copy will have better placement of the musicians; the other copy will have a richer tone. All white hot stampers sound fantastic, and also, they all sound subtly different. It’s just an amazing thing to hear for yourself.

Third, the stamper is only a part of the puzzle. The pressing is only a part of the puzzle. A few of the WHSs we own among us have the same stamper, but most of them did not. Sometimes, there was a family resemblance, like a country of origin. Also, we noticed that the majority of the WHSs we played were NOT original pressings.

It confirmed something we all learned at great expense: Chasing pressings and stampers recommended on the forums, or going based on rarity/price, is simply not a reliable guide to good sound. It lets you tell yourself you have a sought-after record, but it doesn’t allow you to conclude you have a great-sounding copy of that title. The guy on the forum might be right that his copy of that stamper sounds amazing, but that’s little guarantee the one you buy also will.

So, what’s my advice? If you’ve got a collection of hot stampers, do what I did, and invite over some buddies to listen. I’ll bet you’re going to find some people realize they just can’t go back to what they were listening to.

The second-best place to have a stack of Better Records is on your friend’s shelf.

Aaron

Aaron,

Naturally this all comes as music (ahem) to my ears.

Many years ago we noted that there are two ideas that we have found to be at the heart of building a high quality record collection.

One is to appreciate at the deepest level that no two records sound the same, which is something that every audiophile must come to learn through their own experience. You yourself have proven it once again by playing multiple White Hot Stamper pressings and noting the differences among them. It’s clear to you now, if it were ever in doubt, that even the best of the best copies of a given album do not sound exactly the same.

Instead, as you discovered, they all have strengths and weaknesses.

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Letter of the Week – “When I reached moderate hearing loss and faced the crossroads of giving up audio and my beloved music, by divine grace I serendipitously encountered Skeptical Audio.”

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Better Loud Available Now

One of our best customers — and one of our nicest, as you will see — wrote to tell us of his hearing loss and what it has been like to discover Hot Stamper pressings so late in life. (Emphasis added.)

Hi Tom,

I am honored and surprised to have received an apology email directly from Tom Port, whom I respect for saving me from a religious world of preconceptions and labeling.

P.S. I dream of writing to you someday about music, equipment, cleaning, and other topics. For the past six months, I have been shooting out items purchased from Better Records, and although the number of shootouts is small, I am finally beginning to understand what you mean by a good press. I sincerely appreciate you showing me the truth of this world as an elderly person with little time left to live.

I can only thank God (the Source) that my encounter with Better Record came in time for the end of my life.

However, around the time I discovered Better Record, I began suffering from hearing loss.

Yet, even if I can’t catch the subtle nuances in detail, I’ve learned to judge sound quality by a simple method: whether I can immerse myself in the music or not.

Without exception, the records that allow immersion are Hot Stamper editions.

Your body sways, you never get bored, you listen to the entire side without preference, you turn up the volume even more—that’s what Tom is saying, right?

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Letter of the Week – “When the sound field is this huge, lots of things click into place.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a comparison he did between a Super Hot and a White Hot pressing of Rumours.

Dear Tom and Fred,

White Hot Stampers are very special records. I know you know this already, but it still astonishes me every time. It’s been a pleasure to compare the WHS of Rumours to my SHS [Super Hot Stamper].

Tom, I hear you talk about the size of the acoustic space a lot on your blog, but it was hard for me to picture what you meant until I heard it myself.

The WHS sounds bigger than the SHS. It is like I’m sitting a few rows back at a show. It’s such a palpable difference, I feel like I can measure the increased size of the sound field for the WHS. I’d say it’s about two feet more forward, up, and out compared to the SHS.

When the sound field is this huge, lots of things click into place. The instruments have their own space, and that seems to make it easier to follow each of them, and to notice all the details in someone’s playing. It’s really exhilarating.

Vinyl amazes me. It’s just so remarkable that two pressings can differ in terms of the size of the soundstage. What parameter of the pressing gives you that? I’d love to know, but even without understanding the physics of it, the effect is unmistakably real.

I imagine that picking out the white hot stampers is the easiest part of your job. I’m guessing that all it takes is a couple notes of music to know when a particular copy has THAT sound. Finding good candidates, I’m certain, can be tedium, then disappointment when they don’t pan out. But, spotting a 3+ is probably a cinch.

When I first got the SHS of Rumours, I shot it out against all the other copies I had, and it bested them all. It took me a whole afternoon (a delightful afternoon, but still.)

The WHS is simply in a different league. I went back and forth between it and the SHS, track after track, amazed by how easy it was to hear the differences, particularly in the size of the acoustic space. It’s really no wonder your white hots seem to sell faster than your super hots, even at 3-4x the price.

Aaron

Aaron,

The size and space that any given pressing reproduces is one of the most important aspects of the sound that we listen for. Bigger and bolder, without being hyped-up in any way — that is our sound.

This brings to mind a milestone event in the history of Better Records. We did a huge shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second album many years ago, all the way back in 2010. We found two copies with sides that went far beyond any we had ever played. They reproduced the brass from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in a way that we had no idea was possible. We described it this way:

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Letter of the Week – “The Hot Stamper copy went WAY beyond what I expected in terms of the sonic shortcomings I could hear on the other pressings.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

I got the shipment today and it was meticulously packed. It all got here in perfect shape.

I could not resist doing a little side-by-side comparison of Aja tonight, as I have several copies. When I realized that different pressings sounded different (before I found your site) I began accumulating multiple copies, but I find it quite difficult to get loads of mint minus copies of anything. [It’s not as easy as it used to be, that’s for sure.]

Anyway, I was totally blown away. The Hot Stamper copy went WAY beyond what I expected in terms of the sonic shortcomings I could hear on the other pressings. Just… amazing… music.

The good news is my record collection should shrink by at least 75% in size as I sell off all the old multiple copies!

Adrian B.

Adrian,

You TOTALLY get it.

You do your own shootouts.

That way, you have no trouble recognizing how much better our pressing sounds than the ones you own. (This is not a foregone conclusion. You could have told us that you liked one of your copies better, and we would have refunded your money. We can be right a lot, but we can’t be right all the time, nor should we expect to be.)

And you then got rid of the stuff that is not worth keeping because it’s not worth playing.

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Boston Hot Stamper Testimonial – Shooting Out the Big Three

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Boston Available Now

This letter probably came in around 2010 or so, early days in the world of Hot Stampers, which explains the price for the top copy being $250.

This week’s letter comes from our good customer Roger, who did a little shootout of his own among three very different sounding pressings: two Half-Speeds, one by MoFi and one by CBS, probably the two most popular pressings among audiophiles, and our very own Hot Stamper LP.

Here are his findings. Keep in mind that Roger bought a copy priced at $125, half the price of the best copy in our shootout.

Hi Tom,

I got your Boston hot stamper today and enjoyed comparing it to MFSL and CBS half-speed versions in a shootout. I had long since given up on listening to this record since it became part of a communist ploy to brainwash us by playing Boston repeatedly on the radio until we would give up any information they desired. “Deep Purple Lite” was what my college buddies and I used to derisively call it. Now I only wish we had this type of music still around. So I had fun reliving my college days and listening to this LP.

For a pop recording, it is a pretty good recording soundwise, and all 3 pressings were indeed good, if not interesting. I tried the CBS half-speed first, and it was tonally lean with good speed and detail, and bass was extended and quick. However, its Achilles heel was that it had too much energy on top and excessive brightness, something that couldn’t hide from my speakers’ ion tweeters.

Roger, you seem to be using the phrase “tonally lean” unpejoratively (if I can make up such a word), whereas for us here at Better Records, that is the kiss of death for Half-Speeds, and in fact Audiophile Records of All Kinds. Lack of weight down below, lack of Whomp Factor, is the main reason half-speed mastered records are so consistently and ridiculously bad. If not bad, certainly wrong. You can be very sure that Boston would not want, nor would they put up with, that kind of anemic sound for a minute.

The CBS is cut clean from a good tape, so it easily beats the bad domestic pressings, of which there are many. But it can’t rock. What good is a Boston record that doesn’t rock? It’s a contradiction in terms; the band, as well as their debut album, have no other reason to exist.

So the MFSL was somewhat of a relief in that regard, being more sweet and rolled-off on top. However, it sounded bland, blah, slow and murky by comparison. It was still OK sonically with a fuller midband, but didn’t have the midrange energy or dynamics of the CBS and it just seemed slow and plodding, no other way to put it. Bass on the MFSL copy was weightier but more midbass than the quick and extended bass on the CBS.

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Magical Mystery Tour – “I agree with you about Baby You’re a Rich Man – when you turn it up it really comes alive.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is Part Two of Aaron’s letter about the White Hot Stamper German pressing of Magical Mystery Tour he acquired from us recently.

Part One can be found here.

Dear Tom,

Strawberry Fields was the standout for me on side 2.

I agree with you about Baby You’re a Rich Man. As with I Am the Walrus, when you turn it up it really comes alive. The bass is dazzling. The warbly texture it has is unlike anything else. In my room it’s sounding really balanced. Distinct bass, not boomy. Balanced with the top.

Tom, as you know, my room is small. I am sure it’s holding me back in some ways, but I really don’t mind. Someday I dream of a proper listening room, but if I never get there, I can still enjoy the crap out of my records. Citizen Kane also sounds huge in here, so I think I’m not really suffering.

Last thought listening to this record brought up – surface noise, and how totally irrelevant it usually is.

The biggest, most breathtaking records I have (balance of sound and music) are If Only I Could Remember My Name and Zep II. Both WHS copies have surface noise.

The way it just melts away once the music really gets going is just such a cool auditory illusion. Surface noise really has minimal impact on my listening experience, if any at all.

It is a nicety to have a copy as clean and quiet as this one. To think, this thing sat around for nearly 60 years, probably nearly ever played. Who owns a record that sounds this good and never listens to it??

Aaron

Aaron,

Glad to hear you found side two to be every bit as powerful as side one. The copy you now have really knocked us out over here too.

As for surface noise, you hit the nail right on the head. The biggest, most powerful and exciting records, played at good loud levels, will always have some surface noise if you’re listening for it.

But it disappears almost completely when you focus your listening on the music and the sound of the recording.

On a big speakes system like mine, in a big room with a high ceiling, the surface noise seems to occupy a different space relative to the space of the recording. Smaller systems often seem to jam the noise and the sound together. Big systems do a better job of separating them out.

That has been my experience anyway. Glad you are hearing MMT the way we did. What a thrill.

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Magical Mystery Tour – “When John sings, ‘I’m crying,’ I’m right there with him.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Seems like our friend ab_ba heard some truly amazing sound on his latest Hot Stamper acquisition, a White Hot Stamper German pressing (the German true stereo pressing being the only version of the album we offer) of Magical Mystery Tour.

Dear Tom,

My WHS of MMT just arrived. This record is a true treasure.

I’ve wanted to hear a copy ever since I read your commentary on how the cellos dig deeper on the best copies of “I Am the Walrus.”

I played the various copies I already had, listening to see if I could hear the string section really sweat on any of them. Nope.

But on this copy, the whole sound of that song is simply stunning. When John sings, “I’m crying”, I’m right there with him.

After I Am the Walrus ended, I turned up the volume and played it again. It only got better. The room was filled with sound, everything present, nothing harsh, nothing lacking.

It’s funny, the experience of listening to it actually reminded me of Welcome to the Machine, which similarly caps side 1 of another of my absolute favorite White Hot stampers. There are a lot of similarities in mood, soundscape, and theme to those two songs.

Anyway, I am glad you turned me on to this one. I would have put it on my want list if I had known just how stupendous it would turn out to be. I’m back in to my afternoon’s meetings now, but what a thrill it is to know that side 2 awaits me once the work day is over.

Aaron

Aaron,

As usual, thanks for writing.

It just occurred to me that the commentary about the cellists digging in on I Am the Walrus is very similar to the comments I made more than fifteen years ago about Norwegian Wood.

Those close-miked guitars can be a bit much unless you have a super-low-distortion copy.

John strums the hell out of his acoustic in the right channel, and on the best copies the sound of the guitar is very dynamic and energetic. No two copies will get that guitar to sound the same, and the more dynamic and lively it sounds, the better in my book.

Did The Beatles ever write a better song?

On the right pressings, those two songs, on two different Beatles albums, serve to make a very strong case for Hot Stampers.

Think about it: on both albums the tonality of the higher quality pressings will be the same. The bass the same, the vocals the same, the space the same, almost everything you can think of to listen for on a recording will be the same.

And yet the energy and drive you hear when playing those two songs on any two pressings is more often than not going to be different, and sometimes that difference is dramatic. When the energy and drive are especially pronounced on the side we’re playing, assuming all other things are equal, we call it a White Hot Stamper and grade that side Three Pluses.

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Letter of the Week – “What a mind-blowing experience!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (italics and bolding added):

Hey Tom,    

Well, you found another INCREDIBLE Hot Stamper with “Axis: Bold as Love.” What a mind-blowing experience!

This was at least my fifth copy of this album and it shamed all other sad sacks I had bought.

I really don’t know how you do it, but I’m infinitely grateful that you do. The notion of a “great sounding Hendrix album” almost sounds like an oxymoron, but again you struck sonic gold and unearthed one of those rare few that offer a deeply satisfying listening experience – to put it mildly!

My appreciation for Hendrix’s towering musical achievements has doubled, maybe even tripled, from hearing this Hot Stamper. That’s quite a feat for an artist I already considered to be one of the best ever! All this because of those magical Hot Stamper grooves. This goes to show what a difference amazing sound can have on the ability to appreciate an album or artist.

Oh, and I once owned a copy of the abysmal Classic pressing. Among its many other failings is the decision to re-release it in mono. Mono!? “Axis” is one of the creative examples of stereo mixing known to man! Reducing this album to mono is a travesty, but I guess that didn’t bother Classic Records.

Anyhow, keep ’em coming, Tom! You indeed sell the best sounding records in the world.

Dan L.

Dan,

Thanks for your letter. We didn’t care for the Classic Records Axis in mono either. We wrote at the time:

One of the worst things those dummies at Classic ever did. The mono mix sounds just plain awful.

Their reissue of the mono mix is flat and dry with practically no Tubey Magic whatsoever.

It positively screams “CHEAP REISSUE.” That two word description reminds me of this record, although to be fair the sound is quite a bit worse on the Hendrix.

If you want to know more about records that really sound bad in mono, we’ve played and reviewed a few.

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Letter of the Week – “I still find the WHS to Hoffman 45 comparison a particularly insightful one.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Our good customer Aaron is somewhat obsessed with the White Hot Stamper Rumours he bought from us a while back. He finds testing it against the Hoffman 45 RPM version of the album his audiophile friends own instructive, about their systems, what they listen for, and lots more.

I’ve added some comments which I hope are helpful as well. We’ll let him take it from here.

Dear Tom,

I still find the WHS to Hoffman 45 comparison a particularly insightful one. I remember the bass being bloated and wonky on the Hoffman, and tight and impactful on the WHS on my system. I found it that way on [my friend’s] system too, but sometimes live rock music has unpleasant, over-emphasized bass. The kids like it that way I guess.

Aaron,

The proper comparison is not live rock music because a studio album is not really trying to recreate the sound of the band in concert.

On the best pressings the sound should be tonally balanced and correct, with no faults of any kind to draw your attention.

A Super Hot could sound that way. The White Hot would be 25% bigger and clearer and more punchy and resolving while still being balanced and tonally neutral.

Having auditioned and tested them by the hundreds, it has been our experience that Heavy Vinyl records never come to life the way the best vintage pressings do.

You need the right system to hear the difference, and the more right the system, the more you will hear how big the difference is.

I didn’t make any particular note of the position of the vocals, but one thing [my friend’s] system does really well is imaging, so I’m inclined to trust his impression from where he was sitting. It might be that what he was experiencing as accurate, breathtaking sound was described as “forward.” Seems like a reasonable term for that experience.

That could be a bad wire, bad electricity, glare from hi-fi-ish electronics, bad room treatments or no room treatments at all, bad speaker positioning — lots of things make vocals more forward in either a good way or a bad way. This story might be helpful in understanding some aspects of midrange presentation we wrestled with when setting up our new studio.

From where I sat, I could agree with [my friend] that the Hoffman put the snare more forward than the WHS does, but whether you like that or find it a distraction is a matter of taste.

Which is why this is not a good test record.

Where is the snare supposed to be? Who can say?

Good test records are the ones where the sound is clearly more wrong or more right as something in the playback changes, whether it’s a new piece of equipment, a tweak, or a different pressing of the same music.

If the snare is forward on a system, you play an orchestral record and point to the fact that the violins are hard and the brass is honky, or the piano sounds clanky or vague, and then you know you need to fix something because none of those instruments are supposed to sound that way.

But a snare on a rock record?

You didn’t mix the album. You don’t know! Worse, you can’t know.

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Letter of the Week – “I did a lot of research on which pressing to purchase and nobody ever mentioned the version that you sell!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

One our good customers wrote to tell us about his experience playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Abbey Road.

Hi Tom,

Tonight’s been really cool.

I got to hear Abbey Road in such a way that I had no idea existed. I put side one of the SHS I just got and my eyes popped out and my jaw dropped and I went ‘WTF’ was that.

Some of the extended bass rumbles on Come Together really made me smile and go ‘whoa.’

I know what my UK 1st pressing sounds like and I always thought that it was special in comparison to others l’d heard, like the MFSL and Japanese Pro Use.

So now I’m listening to yours somewhat in disbelief. The end of side one just about blew the windows out of the house! Then I put my UK copy on. By comparison, it just sounded flat… but on its own it sounds good.

What an amazing discovery. You are completely correct in your assessment of these ’69 UK pressings.

Thanks again,
Michel

P.S.

Over the last couple of years I did what I thought was a lot of research on which Abbey Road pressing to purchase for the best experience… and nobody ever mentioned the version that you sell.

Michel,

This letter warms our hearts. We’ve known that the original Abbey Road pressings are not the end-all and be-all that some audiophiles and record collectors think they are, and of course the same is true for the legendary Toshiba Pro-Use and MFSL discs.

Been there, done that, left them in the dust a long time ago. Now you know why. You own the pressing that trounces them all.

The fact that no one recommends the pressings we sell as superior to those commonly touted by the so-called experts just confirms that the work we do is difficult and simply cannot be accomplished without a staff and a budget, which, of course, no one in the audiophile or record collecting world has — staff or budget — besides us.

And that what we do is important. Essential even.

As we are the only operation dedicated to this kind of work, with either the staff or the budget it takes to succeed, it is not surprising that no one has figured out the key to Abbey Road. It took us a very long time too. As you may have read elsewhere on the blog:

Skeptical thinking has been key to our success from the very start, and it can be key to your success too. To understand records, you need to think about them critically, not naively, in order to get very far in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves.

Our first big shootout was 2007, and since then we have carried out at least two dozen more for the album, making a lot of Beatles’ fans happy in the process. We helped them spend their money on something that will give them lifelong pleasure.

As for the original sounding flat, you may have seen this too:

Shootouts are the only way to answer the most important question in all of audio: “compared to what?”

Without shootouts, how can you begin to know what are the strengths and weaknesses of the copies you own?

Now that you have done your own shootout, you know how flat your copy was all along — but, as you say, “on its own it sounds good.”

This is the kind of progress in audio we love to hear about.

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