Reissue Pressings with Hot Stampers Available Now
They certainly can be, but quite often they are not, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to any serious record collector, and definitely not to any member of our listening crew.
Reissues come out on top in our record shootouts fairly regularly.
Yes, most of the time the original will beat the reissue, but most of the time is far from always, and since we have to play a big pile of copies anyway (and always with the person doing the grading kept in the dark about the pressing being auditioned), why not evaluate both the originals and the reissues at the same time, on the merits and not on our prejudices?
But this discussion bypasses an important question: What IS an original? Is a record with a 1A stamper an original and a record with a 1B stamper not an original, or slightly less original? Is every copy on the original label an original, and only the copies with the later labels reissues?
To be honest, attempting to lay down strict rules about what constitutes an original is best understood as a fool’s errand, an audiophile parlor game of little use in the real world of records, and one we never cared to play even when we didn’t know how pointless it would turn out to be.
To be blunt about it, we are not the least bit interested in how original a pressing may or may not be.
On this site we are only interested in one thing, the answer to the question: Which copy of the record sounds the best? (Also: In what way? So I guess that’s really two things we are interested in.)
The rest of it we leave to our record collecting brethren.