JW1

And Here I Thought The Mastering Lab Made Nothing But Good Sounding Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:

Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live.  This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.

But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.

One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.

The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it has passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophile. (More on our grading scale here.)

Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere.

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WW, LW, JW? Which Stampers Sound the Best?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

In 2005 we acquired more than a dozen sealed copies of a popular Warner Bros. title, how I don’t remember. (For now we are keeping that title, and even the band that recorded it, a mystery. It might have been The Doobie Brothers, but then again, it might not.)

Our story goes like this:

Knowing that no two of these pressings would sound exactly the same, we decided to crack them open, clean them up and play them.

2005 was very early in the development of Hot Stamper Shootouts. By 2007 we were much better at them, and not coincidentally, that is also the year we decided that Heavy Vinyl pressings were just not good enough for us to bother selling.

All three of the major stamper prefixes for Warners were represented in the various matrix numbers: WW, JW and LW. Once we started to play them it quickly became clear that most copies of this record just do not sound very good.

The typical copy is hard, midrangy, opaque, dull and badly lacks Tubey Magic.

Only one of the prefixes — WW, JW, LW — actually has any hope of sounding good, and surprisingly it’s not the one I would have expected it to be. Live and learn, right?

We liked either JW or WW back in 2005, I don’t remember which, but the evidence we compiled over the ensuing twenty years contradicted that finding.

Live and learn is right, because since the dark days of 2005, we have done this shootout many times, at least five by my count, and it turns out that the stampers we tend to like are exactly the ones we tend to like in general for Warner Bros.

Here is the full stamper sheet from a shootout we did not long ago laying out the stampers we like for this mystery title: LW, with low numbers.

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