Our good customer Aaron recently wrote to us about the concept of records with one set of stampers that always wins shootouts. Most of the discussion involves a lot of “inside baseball” stamper talk which may be of little interest to some of you.
Stamper numbers and shootouts are pretty much all we do here at Better Records, so I was happy to take the time to speculate about aspects of both. There are more than 100 commentaries about mastering on the blog for those who may be interested in digging deeper.
As always, we encourage audiophiles to be more skeptical about anything and everything they may think they know about records.
Aaron writes:
I’m pretty obsessed with your “one stamper wins” section. What a fascinating phenomenon. Having compared notes with Bill, I know that sometimes different stampers DO win. This leads me to wonder, how many white hot stampers are out there?
Across all the titles you do, what’s the range? I think it could be a few dozen for some titles, and a few thousand for others. Would love to hear your thoughts.
My long-winded reply as well as my answers to further questions:
You’re asking how many actual physical pressings exist with White Hot Stampers? On both sides, way fewer. Our Top Shelf (3+/3+) section had four listings in it recently. White Hots number more than 90.
Still, there would be hundreds at a minimum for a record that sold well, and thousands or tens of thousands for a record that sold really well.
Think of Zep II, 100,000 cut by RL. In our shootout from 2024, we had four copies and 2 of them earned 3+ and two of them either 2.5+ or 2+.