Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now
Below you will find the stampers for the pressing from a recent shootout we did for a rock record whose name we are not revealing. 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.
I can’t say this title is typical of most of the rock and pop we play, but it’s not all that unusual either.
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 want to. To do that you have to clean and play about 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 top quality pressings — the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades.
They might all look the same, but they sure don’t sound the same.
In this particular case, the import pressings we played — the ones we expected to do the best as a matter of fact — had by far the worse sound. There were a couple of them, there was a domestic reissue, and there were five originals: eight records in total.
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: