fleetrumou

Letter of the Week – “I could tell the difference right away. It’s amazing what you guys do.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

Just some feedback. I know its been a long time. Anyways, all the albums were great.

The Dire Straits I thought was the best. Fleetwood Mac was next.

Boston is hard for me to listen to nowadays. I used to really be a big Boston fan, played it all the time in the car cassette deck. In fact I first heard album #1 in a friends car deck. Now, I’m not so much a big fan, but The hot stamper was great.

When I first contacted you about your hot stampers you mentioned that I might not be able to notice a big difference with my setup. But I could tell the difference right away. I frequent your site at least once a week looking for something of interest and within my price range. It’s amazing what you guys do.

Anyways, I’ll keep looking and thanks for the awesome hot stampers.

Dear Sir,

Thanks for the kind words. It’s great to hear you are enjoying your Hot Stamper pressings of these wonderful albums. What could be better?

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Letter of the Week – “You’ve created something really special here in Pittsburgh.”

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

Hi Tom,

I know you will be delighted to know that you’ve created something really special here in Pittsburgh.

Last night, Bill had us over for a listening session. Brisket tacos, Japanese whiskey, and his newest pile of White Hot Stampers. The official reason for the get-together (not that we needed any excuse) was because a work colleague of ours, David, had made an offhand remark a couple weeks ago that “vinyl doesn’t sound good.” Bill took that as a direct challenge!

The evening started with some Tidal streaming to Bill’s Chord DAC. David was selecting tracks off his iphone, and he put on The Chain. That was all Bill needed – he grabbed his White Hot Stamper of Rumours, and once the song ended, we switched over to vinyl.

Before the music even started, we could all hear the crackle and pop in the run-in groove. David commented, “see, that’s what I don’t like about vinyl.” We sat and listened to the rest of the song. The crackle of course vanished from our consciousness once the music started, or rather, it kind of hung out in a different space from where the music was. At the end, as if evaluating a fine whiskey, David offered that the bass was more clearly defined on the vinyl, less dominant and bloated, and that there were details he was hearing in the vinyl that he just hadn’t noticed in the digital. He characterized the vinyl/digital difference as, “I guess it depends on what you’re going for.”

I had brought my EAR with me. Bill swapped a few cables, and with the EAR in place, we listened to The Chain again, now utterly enraptured. I turned to David at the end, and all he said this time was, “that was fantastic.”

From there, there was no stopping us. We listened to Wish You Were Here. Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto. Rhapsody in Blue. Abraxas. All just mesmerising, room-filling sound. Once a record went on the table, it didn’t come off until the side was over.

David had brought along a stack of his dad’s records. In the pile was SRV’s Couldn’t Stand The Weather. Turns out Bill had just come across a super-clean copy in the used racks at one of our local shops. We played Tin Pan Alley back to back, first with David’s copy then Bill’s. David found out for himself that no two copies of a record sound the same. And Bill was reminded that he can’t just walk into a store, buy a Near Mint record, and expect to get something that sounds great.

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Letter of the Week – “I wonder if you’ve ever had another customer who doesn’t own a turntable buy a White Hot stamper from you?”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Aaron has been trying to help his audiophile friends learn the differences between good records and Heavy Vinyl records. This first story concerns Chuck, who sold Aaron the VPI table you see pictured.

Aaron writes:

Chuck’s a real record guy. I played him some hot stampers, alongside the same record in heavy vinyl format.

First up was Rumours – white hot up against the Hoffman 45 mastering. He wanted to hear “you make loving fun,” so we did.

The drums on the Hoffman are more prominent, and they grab you right away. Way out of balance to my taste.

He said, “Hoffman’s done a great job with the drums. But it comes at the expense of Christine’s voice. That’s okay, I never loved her as a singer anyway.”

Next I busted out my holy grail, and played him my Zep 2 WHS. Followed up by the Jimmy Page remastering. The latter is indeed a decent record, Tom, as you say. But the clarity on the drums is superior on the Ludwig. [Clarity is not the word I would have chosen, but that’s another story for another day.]

As Chuck put it, “I never thought of this as a vocal record.” Plant’s voice just has so much more emotion on the hot stamper than on the Page version. He said, “the Page version takes out some of the humanity.” I totally agreed with that. Chuck was amazed that you were able to find and sell me a RL copy with such clean vinyl. I took the record off the table and showed it to him – he was amazed to see how scuffed it looked. It’d grade VG at best visually, but man does it play clean.

So, record after record, Chuck could hear what the hot stampers were doing. And, no doubt, the VPI table is making the hot stampers sound better, and in comparison, the heavy vinyl sounds even duller.

That said, this turntable is so much more revealing than my Clearaudio was, that there is always something delightful to listen to on my heavy vinyl records. They don’t sound worse, they sound better than they used to. It’s just that the gap between them and the hot stampers is only continuing to grow wider.

So, my man Chuck, who sold me his VPI turntable, saw the light. But then he shielded his eyes from it. Even though Chuck’s got a stack of 25 benjamins in his hand right now, I don’t think any of that is headed your way, Tom.

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Listening in Depth to Rumours

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

This is a rock album — it needs to be played LOUD and it needs to be played on a DYNAMIC system.

Case in point: consider how quietly The Chain starts out, and how loud it is by the end. Those kinds of macro-dynamics are very rare on a pop recording. Rumours has the kind of dynamics you just don’t hear anymore, which is why the killer copies are a such a THRILL to play on a big dynamic system fitted with a top-notch turntable.

The best copies exhibited the kind of presence, bass, dynamics and energy found only on the kind of Super Demo Discs we rave about here endlessly: the BS&Ts, Stardusts, Zumas and the like. When you get a good copy of this record, it is a Demo Disc.

Who knew? Who even suspected? Who raves about Rumours but us? Let’s fact it, the audiophile world has no clue how good this record can sound.

Quick Listening Test — Dreams

What do the best copies have that the also-rans don’t? Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you may want to pay special attention to: the sound of the snare. When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good “slap” to the sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy — all the stuff we ADORE about the sound of the best copies of Rumours.

Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare on Dreams. That’s probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to the entire Rumours album, as well as anything by The Beatles, and Neil Young’s Zuma, and lots of our other favorite records, and we expect favorites of yours too.

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Letter of the Week – “Your discovery is easily the most amazing thing of all the amazing things this audiophile has come across in 30 years of amazing things.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

Friend over recently, played Fleetwood Mac Rumours, 45RPM. He says that’s gonna be awful hard to beat. “With one arm tied behind my back! Watch this!”

Wow, that was more open….!

Your discovery is easily the most amazing thing of all the amazing things this audiophile has come across in 30 years of amazing things.

Keep at it, no one else can, we are counting on you.

Hi,

Thanks for the kind words.

Finding a pressing with amazing sound is our top goal in every shootout we do. It is not hard to beat the 45 RPM 2 disc set that Steve Hoffman mastered. This story has many similarities to the one you recount in your letter.

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Heavy Vinyl Quality Control? We Put That Proposition to the Test

bellcurve500

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

Part one of this commentary concerns the random results of all record making processes. It can be found here.

A Heavy Vinyl Shootout

A number of years ago (2011?) we had the opportunity to crack open two brand new sealed copies of a recently remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing came our way. I already had one which I was waiting to audition, so that meant there were actually three copies to play.

At the time, we were told that with this pressing every effort was made to produce the highest quality product and to maintain the utmost in quality control throughout the production process. They fellow representing the company distributing the title was adamant that every copy produced, from first to last, would be indistiguishable from any other — not just in terms of surfaces, but sound quality too.

To accomplish this feat, the producer used the real master tapes (we were told, no reason to doubt him), had a well known mastering engineer do the mastering at a highly-regarded studio, then had a well-known audiophile pressing plant in Germany make the record, using the finest vinyl compounds available, in presses that meet the highest standards in the industry, operated by skilled individuals of the utmost professionalism.

Any stamper would be replaced long before it could possibly be showing any wear.

All the metal mothers and stampers would be made in a way designed to eliminate all variation.

One and only one complete run would be made. If another was needed at some later date the whole process would have to be started over from scratch using the same strict quality controls.

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Letter of the Week – “I did a proper shootout this morning…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I’m on my fourth Hot Stamper now, and I’m having a wonderful experience overall. I wanted to touch base regarding a Super Hot Stamper (Quiet Vinyl) of Rumours. The sound is overall a delight, and although I have yet to do a head-to-head shootout with my 45rpm “audiophile” copy, I can sense I will prefer the copy I bought from you overall.

However, I really crave absolutely silent vinyl for this album, especially for The Chain. When the band comes to a halt, and there’s nothing but silence, it’s perfect. The particular copy I bought is pretty quiet when the music is playing, but the surface noise during quiet/silent passages is a bit of a disappointment for me. This leads me to believe that if a White Hot Stamper of Rumours popped up on your site, I would definitely want to buy it, in the hopes that the vinyl would be even quieter throughout. Do you think a White-Hot copy of Rumours is on the horizon?

I believe your policy is that I’ve got 30 days to return this one for money back, and then 12 months to exchange it, with some reduction. Knowing me, I’m going to want to get a white hot copy next time I see one listed, and I’d really love to do it sooner rather than later. (I say this assuming that one of the things that would separate a super hot from a white hot would be the level of background noise.)

Thank you
Aaron

Aaron,

Some thoughts:

Firstly, the surface noise grades and the sonic grades are not related.

Some records sound great and are noisy, some records sound great and are quiet, and nobody knows which are which until they get cleaned and played.

My advice would be to return the record so that we can eventually get you one you will be happy with. We do the shootout once or twice a year, so we should be able to find you a better sounding copy. A quieter copy is another matter.

We could do a shootout for 8-10 copies and find none that were any quieter than the one we sold you. 

We know what to listen for now, the quiet parts of The Chain. But that does not mean that out of the copies we play in any given year a copy with Super Hot grades would be quieter than the copy we sent you.

To get you a quieter one is a matter of luck, it might take three or four shootouts to get that lucky.

But if you want to keep the copy we sent you and basically “rent” it until we can find you a quieter one in a year or two, that is one of your options. We are good either way, Rumours sells very quickly, lots of folks waiting for a nice copy to show up on the site.

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Letter of the Week – “LOVE the product!”

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

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

Hey Tom, 

I’m trying to put a world class collection together of LP’s that I like from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Neil Young and “best sounding albums of all time” from any era.

I want only the best. $500, $1000+, I have a blank check for the best mint copies with priority on sound and not covers. Is there a way to go about this without having to pull up the site or check emails constantly?

Already bought shootout winners of Fleetwood Mac white album and Rumours and Pink Floyd the Wall.

Please advise.

LOVE the product!

Thanks, Mike (more…)

A Ten to Twenty Dollar Used Record? Yeah, We Know Already

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

You would have to go through at least a dozen or more copies of Rumours to even hope to find one in a league with our best pressings. That’s a lot of record hunting, record cleaning and record playing!

If you know anything about this record, you know that the average domestic pressing of this album is quite average sounding; the good ones are few and far between.

And the stampers, as we’ve come to learn, aren’t the whole story. For one thing, there are at least 75 different side ones and 75 different side twos, all cut by Ken Perry at Capitol on the same three cutters from — we’re assuming, we weren’t there — the same tapes.

But of course they all sound different. Ken also cut the original English and Japanese pressings; his KP is in the dead wax for all to see. The two import KP copies that I heard were quite good, by the way. Not the best, but very good. He only cut the originals though, so practically every import copy you can find will be a reissue made from a dub, ugh.

A Ten to Twenty Dollar Used Record? Yeah, We Know Already

So if you’re the kind of person who likes to complain about us charging hundreds of dollars for a record that can be found in every used bin in town for under twenty, save yourself some typing: that’s the price we pay too.

And if the copy you paid fifteen bucks for sounds good enough, more power to you. Go with god, as they say.

But if your copy doesn’t thrill you — and it’s unlikely that it does — then you have a lot of work ahead of you if you expect to find one that sounds like ours. We wish you well. We wish everybody who likes to do his own shootouts well.

We know the kind of time and energy it takes to find great records, probably better than anyone on the planet. If you have that kind of time and energy available to you, go for it. It takes us a staff of six and access to all the records in the record capitol of the world to pull it off, with thirty years experience doing it no less.

But it can be done, and you can do it. You just have to be willing to put in the time and effort. The records are cheap, right? Fifteen bucks each, we know already.

Letter of the Week – “These prices are insane – but then so is the quality. And you notice I keep buying more.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Hey Tom, 

Please let me know if you have a better copy on hand. Being Rumours and all you will probably want a fortune for it I’m sure, but please let me know anyway. These prices are insane – but then so is the quality. And you notice I keep buying more. Thanks!

Charles

Charles,

We do indeed charge a fortune for Rumours these days, but the music and the sound justify the price many times over in our opinion. We can’t keep them in stock, if that tells you anything.

Happy to put you on the list for the next killer copy. Like you, those who have tried one of our Hot Stamper pressings seem more than a little pleased with the sound quality.

Thanks for writing,

TP