What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?
Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many copies of the same album as you can get your hands on.
There are basically four steps in this process. In order to discover your own Hot Stampers, you must take great pains with all four if you are going to find success in evaluating the pressings you’ve found.
We discuss each and every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this very site. Although none of it will come as news to those of you who spend much of their time on this blog, our commentary here is simply lays out the basic formula for the process.
If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly than most audiophiles and record collectors think is necessary.
The Four Cornerstones of Hot Stampers
The work required to find Hot Stamper pressings comprises these four steps.
- You must have a sufficient number of copies to play in order to find at least one “hot” one.
- You must be able to clean your copies properly in order to get them to sound their best.
- You must be able to reproduce your copies faithfully.
- You must be able to evaluate them critically.
How It Used to Be
It’s an open question whether before, say, 2010 we could have done shootouts for many of the albums you’ve seen come to the site since then. Frankly, I have my doubts.
But the good news in audio is that things change. It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad now sound pretty darn good. The site is full of commentaries about them. Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.
The recordings don’t change. Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper Revolution is all about.
You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and consider the case closed. You did the right thing, you played by the rules, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, all that kind of stuff. Cross that title off and move on to the next.