early-struggle

Not that Long Ago Blue Was a Nut We Just Could Not Crack

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

Allow me to tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

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When We First Started Doing Shootouts, They Would Sometimes Go on for Days

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Our first Hot Stamper listing for After the Gold Rush from back in 2005 talked about what a struggle it was doing them at first.

Back then, with not much in the way of staff, I often had to put the records on the table one at a time and do all the listening and note-taking myself.

For our first Hot Stamper listing I wrote:

A record like this might go through 4 or 5 stages of cleaning and listening and cleaning again. I spent many hours listening to the various copies I played over the course of two days, first one track, then another, this copy, then that one. There’s no other way to do it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no substitute for hard work.

If you can call it that. It ain’t too hard playing a great album over and over again. Some people — myself included — might even call it fun. And now I love this album more than I ever did. I feel like I have come to know it. I’m positively thrilled to finally know how good it really is!

Isn’t that why we audiophiles go through all this shite, as the Brits say? When I hear a piece of familiar music sound better than I ever thought I would hear it, better than I ever imagined it, it’s everything to me. It’s the biggest thrill I know of in audio. It’s what I live for. If you like that feeling, this is the record for you!

I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I find another copy that sounds like this one, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a long time. How many bad domestic rock records did I have to play in order to find a record that sounds like this? A hundred? More?! Who knows? It was a lot, that’s for damn sure.

Speaking of Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

It’s precisely the powerful sound found on this album that rocks our world and makes our job fun. It makes us want to play records all day, sifting through the crap to find the few — too few — pressings with truly serious Hot Stamper sound.

There is, of course, no other way to find such sound, and, of course, probably never will be.

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Our First Shootout for Crime of the Century Was a Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Those of you who’ve watched the site over many years may know this, but it bears mentioning — it was rare for us to have Hot Stamper copies of this album to offer our customers back in the day. The first White Hot Stamper copy went up in 2008 and the next one didn’t go up until 2011(!).

Here’s what we had to say about that sorry state of affairs in 2008.

We actually attempted an all-day shootout late in 2007 that we had to abandon after every copy we played — without exception, mind you — either sounded bad or was too noisy to sell. We must have tried at least ten good-looking British pressings,only to come up empty-handed at the end of the day.

The Speakers Corner pressing beats the average original, I can tell you that without fear of contradiction.

Of course, all Speakers Corner copies are going to sound different — perhaps our review copy is one of the Hot ones.

By 2011 we had gained some perspective.

The bit about the Speakers Corner pressings sounding different has now been proven beyond any doubt. The copy we cracked open for one of our later shootouts didn’t sound nearly as good as the one we played in 2007.

UPDATE 2025

It’s important to remember that the stereo, our cleaning technologies, and, most importantly, even our ears were different 15 years ago. And, during our formative shootout years, lots of audio progress was made, especially from 2007 to 2011. 2007 is when we discovered the Prelude Record Cleaning system, and that pretty much changed everything for us.

Our Take from 2007

The early British pressings have a smoother midrange compared to practically anything else out there. You may have noticed that good British copies never make it to the site, and there’s a simple explanation for that.

Most early British copies (and later ones too) just do not sound good. On top of that, they are rarely quiet enough to play and enjoy. I can’t tell you how many British COTC pressings I’ve heard in the last 5 years that didn’t sound good or were noisy and groove damaged. But it’s a lot.

Well, things have certainly changed. The British copies do very well in our shootouts these days.  Up until 2020, the right domestic pressings were sometimes winning shootouts.

Now we believe the Brits have the potential for the best sound. Here is a recent example that went for big bucks.

All it takes is for the right domestic pressing to win a shootout and we will be back to saying what is probably the best way to think about the album — both domestics and imports can sound amazingly good.

It all comes down to the copies you have on hand, how you clean them and how well you can play them.

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Harvest Was a Struggle in 2008

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Harvest is undeniably one of the most beloved albums in all of classic rock. We get letters all the time from customers hoping to get their hands on Hot Stamper copies, but we’ll never have the supply to keep up with the demand.

It’s a tough nut to crack, because a Hot Stamper Harvest has to get so many things right — the lovely pedal steel guitar on Out On The Weekend, the LSO on A Man Needs A Maid and There’s A World (engineered by Glyn Johns), Neil’s grungy electric guitar on Alabama, and so much more. 

Many copies we played would work for the heavy songs and then fall behind on the softer numbers. Others had gorgeous sound on the country-tinged numbers but couldn’t deliver any whomp for the rockers.

A Copy For The Ages from 2008

Side two of this copy has STUNNINGLY GOOD SOUND! It’s punchy and lively with some of the BIGGEST BASS we’ve ever heard for this album. You won’t believe the WHOMP on this record — just listen to how hard Alabama ROCKS! The overall sound is big, open, and spacious with amazing transparency and lots of extension up top. The vocals are Right On The Money — very present with loads of texture. We rate side two an A+++ — that’s Master Tape Sound, folks, As Good As It Gets!

Drop the needle on Old Man. On virtually every copy we audition the chorus vocals strain to the point of being unpleasant, but here they are smooth and sweet.

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For Our Sweet Baby James Shootout in 2008 We Had to Work Through 67 Copies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

UPDATE 2020

As you may have guessed from the title of this review, it was written in 2008, fairly early in our shootout history. We had been buying Sweet Baby James for decades, and by 2008 it was time to dive in to this classic from 1970, a landmark recording that single-handedly created a new genre, the singer songwriter album.

It took three days, sixty seven copies, and multiple rounds, but SWEET BABY JAMES HOT STAMPERS ARE HERE.

Both sides of this bad boy are DEMO QUALITY and ABSOLUTELY STUNNING. Add in the fact that the vinyl is unusually quiet and you’ve got one heck of a copy here.

It ain’t easy to find copies of this album with great sound on both sides and reasonably quiet surfaces — that’s why you haven’t seen more than one Hot copy hit the site since February 08. 

This was one of the most massive shootouts in Better Records history.

We started out with SIXTY SEVEN copies. After weeding out the copies with obvious condition problems and known second-rate stampers, we were left with three dozen copies to audition.

We battled through condition problems, bad stereo days [a thing of the past nowadays, thank god], and listener fatigue to end up with a select number of exceptional copies. 

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Getz-Gilberto – Our Shootout Winner from 2012

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now

We have been trying to find great sound (on reasonable surfaces) for this album for YEARS — I kid you not — but this 2-pack is the first Hot Stamper version to ever hit the site.

We have fired up this shootout multiple times since 2006 and been left empty-handed each and every time, right up until the latest go-around. We have sunk an insane amount of dough into trying to find killer copies because we love the music so much, but we just haven’t had much to show for it.

If you love this Brazilian-flavored cool jazz as much as we do, you might want to snap this one up because who knows when or if we’ll find another one.

Stan Getz is a truly great tenor saxophonist, the cool school’s most popular player. This LP is all the evidence you need. Side one has those wonderfully relaxed Brazilian tempos and the smooth sax stylings of Stan Getz.

Side two for me is even more magical. Getz fires up and lets loose some of his most emotionally intense playing. These sad, poetic songs are about feeling more than anything else and Getz communicates that so completely you don’t have to speak Portugese to know what Jobim is saying. Call it cool jazz with feeling.

Side one here has good bass, wonderful transparency and more presence than we heard elsewhere. The female vocals sound excellent and the sax is full bodied with clear leading-edge transients.

The side two of this set is even better, more extended up top and incredibly smooth and sweet overall. It’s got the impressive presence of the first side but could stand to be a bit fuller.

Both sides are a bit noisy as is pretty much always the case with this record — a big reason why we’ve struggled so hard with this album. The other big reason is that most copies just plain sound mediocre or worse, which you can find out for yourself by flipping over either of the Hot sides in this set.

This is an All Time jazz classic and it’s a shame we can’t find more great copies. This one isn’t going to be a top Demo Disc for any of you but it will give you two sides that show you how lovely this music sounds when you’re lucky enough to get a hold of a copy that’s not poorly mastered and obscured by seriously noisy vinyl.

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We Give Up on Chicago III, For Now Anyway

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

We gave up in the 2010s,w hich is when this was written:

Don’t hold your breath for a Hot copy of this album — we just attempted a shootout and came up empty-handed. I doubt we’ll ever find a copy that does what we want it to.

[UPDATE 2023: We finally did manage to do a shootout, and this is the copy that ended up on the site on a Hot Stamper pressing. As the response was underwhelming, Chicgo 3 has been tagged as a never again title, a record you, dear reader, will have to find for yourself.

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