full-sheet

Some Blue Notes with New York Labels Just Cannot Be Beat

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Warning: the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this commentary.

Our shootout in 2024 involved all the most important Blue Note labels for this mystery title. New York, Liberty, Black B, White B, all present and accounted for, and all with RVG in the dead wax. (For those who want to know which labels to avoid on Blue Note, you will have to dig through our voluminous reviews and commentaries.)

We don’t need to tell you that those early pressings take us years to find, and cost us a pretty penny — at least the ones that are in audiophile playing condition do — when we can even manage to get hold of them.

And we probably return at least half of what we buy, doubling the trouble of getting a shootout going.

Some folks who produce Heavy Vinyl Blue Note reissues and some of those who review them will tell you that Rudy did not know how to master a record properly. They don’t think his pressings should sound very good to audiophiles, assuming the equipment these audiophiles own is of the highest quality, the way they assume theirs is.

Naturally we think audiophiles who believe any of the above are as wrong as wrong can be. And you can easily prove to yourself just how misguided they are simply by ordering one of our Hot Stamper pressings and playing it.

You can send it back — that’s up to you — but at least you will know how full of it these audiophile reviewers must be to write such nonsense. We love Rudy and make no bones about it. He is one of the All Time Greats.

Our notes for a recent shootout are shown below. There were six pressings in all, each of them mastered by RVG himself, which unsurprisingly are the only ones with any hope of sounding good, if our experience can act as a guide.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for La Boutique Fantasque Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Rossini Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Our current favorite recording of La Boutique Fantasque is the one Solti recorded for Decca in 1957.

It belongs to that very special group of roughly 150 orchestral recordings which have the potential to offer the discriminating (and well-heeled) audiophile the best performances of major works with by far the highest quality sound.

It has been our experience that modern remastered pressings simply cannot compete with the best pressings of these landmark recordings.

The Fiedler (LSC 2084) is still a very good record, but we no longer see much reason to carry it when the Solti is better in almost every way (and quieter as a rule to boot).

Below we have reproduced our full stamper sheet, including the Shootout Winning stampers, which happen to be 3S/4S for this album.

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Is It Hard for You to Imagine Similar Stampers Sounding So Different?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Subtitle: it’s also hard to imagine that space and time are two aspects of the same reality, spacetime, but that’s why we employ rigorous scientific methods to test our theories and — in some cases — prove ourselves wrong.

We here at Better Records like testing records. We want to know if the predictions we make about the titles we play are accurate, which is simply to say, do they match the data derived from our blinded shootouts?

In the case of the stampers for this mystery title, it turns out that whatever intuitions we may have had going in would have been no help at all. Who could possibly predict that, for sound quality on side one, 13s would substantially beat 12s, 12s would beat 15s, and that 15s would beat 11s.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for Rhythms of the South Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Exotica and Bachelor Pad Recordings Available Now

There are some records that, no matter how amazing the sound, and how good the music is, simply will not find favor with our customers. This is one of them. I happen to like the music, and the sound is shockingly good, a true Demo Disc for those of you with big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a spacious, heavily treated room like the one you see below.

We are most likely not going to be doing shootouts for this title in the future, so we thought we would share with everyone what we know about the record, which boils down to which stampers have the potential to do well and which do not.

As you can see, Stan Goodall did a much better job mastering the early Blueback London pressings for Decca than Jack Law.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?

The originals all have the same Blueback cover.

In this case, the stamper numbers are the only way to separate the potential winners from the sure losers.

11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 3 3 1E 1E other copies: 2.5/2, 2/2.5
11/2023 Ros, Edmundo Rhythms of the South (PS 114 London) early Blueback 1.5 1 2D 2D s1 dry, flat, trashy. s2 smeary, messy, boring
RE ABOVE: I FOUND THIS IN A BOX. THOUGHT IT SOUNDED REALLY GREAT, ESP. T1, S1

Jack Law’s cutting for side one was

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3s Can Have Amazingly Good Sound, or 3s Can Have Mediocre Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?

Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.

A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.

As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

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It’s Already So Good, How Could It Get Any Better?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.

But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings of CS 6101, Music of Berlioz, are the way to go.

It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.

It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.

Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound  tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.

No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.

No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.

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What Can You Learn from a Mercury Shootout Like This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

The short answer is that you can’t learn much from this shootout, because we’re not telling you which title the stampers you see below belong to.

Be that as it may, in the case of this mystery title the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — the earlier numbered pressings did better than the later numbered pressings, and the early labels did better than the later labels.

That happens a lot, and we are happy to admit that it does. Why? Because the experimental evidence — the data — say that is what happened.

As usual for posts in which the stamper sheet from a shootout is reproduced in its entirety, the stamper numbers shown below will belong to a different album than the one you see pictured.

These can be found under the heading of Mystery Stampers. Most of these posts will illustrate something to be learned from a Hot Stamper shootout, but because the information reveals the shootout winning stampers, the actual title of the record is rarely revealed.

Much more useful stamper information can be found using this link, which includes plenty of stamper numbers for specific titles that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound. In addition, we post the winning and losing stampers for some titles that are an unreliable guide to good sound. Unreliable stampers are also quite common.

The right stampers are only one of the many reasons some copies win our shootouts and others don’t, but in the case of this rare Mercury, a record that we only had four copies of, the RFR-2/2 stampers were clearly the best, with no other set of stampers coming close. The best of the others earned grades no better than 2+/2+.

One lesson that was clear was that the best stampers were, to quote our reviewer, “a step up!”

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RE-2 Wins Our Shootouts for this Jimmy Smith Recording

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

What happens when all the stampers are RE-2?

This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the Jimmy Smith Verve album you see pictured to the left and whose stamper sheet is shown below.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings? The stamper numbers are no help.  There were some markings in the dead wax for the 3+ copies that were different from the copies that earned lower grades, but they are hard to read and most sellers we buy from would struggle to identify them.

No, on this record there was really nothing to go by other than the sound.

From our shootout panel’s point of view, this is the only way it can possibly work.

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Here Are the Shootout Winning Stampers for SR 90435

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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Sometimes the Earliest Stampers Just Cannot Be Beat

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom in an attempt to make the case that, although the most common record collecting approaches are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know what approach will produce the best results for any given title.

Rather than post one exception after another — easily done, since we know literally hundreds of them — we are happy to admit that the generally accepted record collecting rules of thumb* work well for most records, with the definition of “most” being “more than half the time.”

In the case of this Mystery London, the received wisdom turns out to be right on the money. (As per our policy, please note that the Mahler album you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this post.)

What conclusions can we draw from this information?

We would be very surprised if the earlierst pressings cut by Harry Fisher (1W/1W) can be beaten for sound. It’s possible, of course, and we will naturally continue to buy pressings with other stampers, if for no other reason than the fact that they are far more plentiful than the first pressings.

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