Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now
UPDATE 2022
In 2012, according to some old notes we had from an early shootout, perhaps our first, we auditioned a copy of Massenet’s Le Cid with what we thought was a suboptimal side two, a side two that we thought suffered from screechy string tone.
Since that time we’ve made a number of improvements to our cleaning regimen and playback system, and the result has been that our last couple of shootouts went off without a hitch, showing us string tone that was virtually free of screechiness.
(The Greensleeves reissues never had a “screechy strings” problem as they tended to be mastered with a smoother EQ. They are more forgiving of second-rate playback in that respect, but they can also never win shootouts with that overly smooth sound.) [1]
Problem solved! The records were fine, we just couldn’t play them back then as well as we can now.
Our Review from 2012
In 2012, twelve years ago, I had been selling records to audiophiles professionally for 25 years. I had owned what I considered to be a State of the Art system for 37 years.
But I knew I still had plenty to learn, and I kept at it.
After a decade’s worth of tweaking and tuning, the strings of this recording started to sound the way Stuart Eltham and his fellow engineers undoubtedly wanted them to.
This is how you chart your audio progress, by challenging yourself with difficult to reproduce recordings and building on the improvements you continue to make as the years and decades go by.
If you’re in the market for records that can show you that there is still plenty of work left to be done in this crazy audio hobby we’ve chosen, we have scores of them on the Better Records site for sale .
If we can get them to sound better, so can you.
[1] Our latest preoccupation here on the blog is to point out as often as we can that the Modern Heavy Vinyl remaster is too often just too damn smooth.
The remastered box sets of The Beatles (see: Pepper, Sgt.., etc.) are the poster boys for making records sound more “analog” by boosting the bass and smoothing the treble, like your old 70s system used to do. (Those of you who were in the hobby back then know exactly the sound I am talking about. For those who would like to know more, we wrote this overview.)
The Beatles records that we sell as Hot Stampers have nothing in common with that absurdly artificial approach. Mid-Fi systems may benefit from more bass and less top end, but Hi-Fi systems worthy of the name will not, hence our distaste for this kind of EQ overreach. More examples of overly smooth modern records can be found here, with more to be added as time permits.