More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions
Not necessarily. What makes a Hot Stamper hot is reasonably good sound. At the very least a Hot Stamper should sound quite a bit better than any other pressing you have heard.
Not every album was well-recorded. (Here are some examples of records that you are not likely to be playing for your friends in order to show off your system, even if you have one of our White Hot Stamper pressings.)
As a result, the records made from those recordings will display most of the limitations that are baked into the master tape. A good engineer can fix an awful lot of problems in mastering, but, to mix a few metaphors, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is rarely if ever going to be in the cards.
For that reason, the records we review must be graded on a curve.
In our shootouts we compare apples to other apples. There is simply no other practical way to do it.
Out of the pile of pressings we have available, usually comprising six to twelve records, we clean them up and play them in order to find out which are the best sounding ones. If the winners of the shootout have the best sound we heard on both sides, they go into our Top Shelf section, which as of this writing has 13 members.
Any record that has one Shootout Winning side goes into our White Hot Stampers section. (There are more than ten times as many of those as of this writing. If you think a record you have cannot be beat on either side, that is very unlikely to be the case. We are happy to sell you the record that will beat it, and it will probably beat it on both sides, truth be told, and if it doesn’t, you get your money back.
We also guarantee that no Half-Speed mastered record or Heavy Vinyl LP sounds as good as even the lowest-graded Hot Stampers we offer. We’ve played too many of these so-called audiophile pressings to worry about them being competitive with the records on our site.
(One actually was competitive recently, but what a fluke that record was. Another word for fluke is outlier, and we really, really love those, but a Heavy Vinyl pressing winning a shootout? That has happened exactly once.)
It is our strongly held conviction that the better your system gets, the worse — or at the very least the more artificial, veiled, ambience-challenged, frequency-limited and uninvolving — those records will sound.
The question every audiophile who collects records for sound quality must grapple with is “how high is up?”
That’s what shootouts are for. To judge the relative merits of individual pressings, regardless of how well or how poorly the rcording is (as if we could ever know such a thing.).