Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now
A letter we received not long ago made the point that the Japanese pressing of Thriller the owner had been listening to for years, even decades, fell well short of the mark set by the sound of the White Hot Stamper pressing he now owned.
To think, I spent all those years playing and re-playing a record that was bright and edgy, none the wiser to matrix numbers and pressing variations.
I agreed, saying that I myself learned the hard way, having wasted some of my own money on them. that Japanese pressings were almost always a crock, writing:
Most Japanese pressings cater to what a mid-fi system would need to sound good and a hi-fi system would find ruinous. They are almost always made from dubbed tapes, which are then brightened up in the mastering phase since that is the sound that appeals to the Japanese market for some reason unknown to me. Old school audio equipment — horn speakers and vintage tube electronics — would be my guess.
A fellow who saw an opening to set me straight and take me down a peg, all without having to learn how to use that pesky shift key on his computer, left the following comment in that post:
the japanese pressings were mastered by BG. the only difference being the quality of the material. nice try though, snakeoil salesman.
I immediately went to battle stations. I doubted whether Bernie Grundman has mastered any pressings for the Japanese market, but I couldn’t say for sure. It’s a question that had never come up. We ourselves had discovered a very good sounding pressing of Tusk that was mastered by Ken Perry and pressed in Japan, so I knew it was possible that the original mastering engineer could have sent metalwork to Japan for the Japanese to produce properly-mastered records for their market.
Fortunately, Discogs makes checking such things fairly easy. I went right up to the listing for Thriller and clicked on all the Japanese original pressings to see if there was any evidence to show that he had mastered them.
Bernie Grundman’s name was credited on the back cover as the mastering engineer, but I didn’t put much stock in that. I assumed that he did not master the album for their market, since that is hugely impractical. I surmised that removing his credit would have badly defaced the jacket, something I doubted the Japanese would have found acceptable. They seem to be very particular about these things.
Sure enough, here is what the stampers look like for the typical Japanese pressing that supposedly would have been mastered by BG:
There are about half a dozen original Japanese pressings for the album on Discogs and all the stamper listings look like the one above.
If you know anything about records, you know that these markings could not have been created by Bernie Grundman’s mastering operation here in the states.