Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now
UPDATE 2026
I don’t recall — it was fifteen years ago and we’ve played a lot of copies since then — but these notes may have been generated for our first shootout of McCartney’s Unplugged album.
Back then we would have been limited to buying them locally in stores, so it might have taken us quite a few years to acquire enough copies in to do the shootout.
By the way, the original wholesale cost to the stores was $7 and change. Most stores were charging $20-25 when the record came out. I knew guys who bought a case or more, knowing that the album was soon to go out of print with a limited run of 50k. They quickly raised that to 75k because of the demand was so high. They found they could get $50 a pop as soon as that happened, which wasn’t long. (In 1991 music lovers were not being inundated with a ridiculous number of pointless reissues they way they are today. Record Store Day, I’m looking at you.)
I mention below that 8 out of 10 copies sound pretty good, which is not quite true. There are lots of copies that don’t sound very good at all, but if you know the trick to avoiding them, then yes, 8 out of 10 will at least sound “good.”
McCartney Unplugged is one of those records that helped us dramatically improve our playback quality. If you have the time, we encourage you to check out the links at the bottom of this post.