mon-2026

Made In Japan – UK Vinyl But Mastered in the States?

More of the Music of Deep Purple

To our dismay, we discovered that some of the stampers for some of the sides on some of the British import pressings are actually sourced from a well known American cutting house. When those sides did poorly in the shootout, naturally we wanted to know more about them in order to avoid buying any more pressings with those markings.

We had no idea the British would “import” the metalwork from here, but they did, and the results were not good, at least not for us audiophiles.

I hope it goes without saying that we will not be selling any versions of the album that are not cut in England.

This is what you learn when you have lots of copies of the same album and play them against each other.

We constantly experiment with different record pressings this way and we recommend you do the same.

Carry out as many experiments as you can find time for. The quality of your collection — at least the sonic quality of your collection — will improve immensely.

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The Right 360 Stereo Pressing of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM Is King

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

We played a big stack of copies a while back and ran into all kinds of problems.

Some were dull, some were spitty, many were smeared, and far too many were gritty.

The later pressings didn’t solve any of these problems.

In fact, none of the Red Label copies we’ve ever played sounded good enough on either side to merit a Hot Stamper grade. If you want good sound for this album, 360 stereo pressings seem to be the only way to go. The mono pressings we played were painfully bad.

Stick with stereo on this album.

The Mono pressings — at least the ones we’ve played — aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time).

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Ruben and the Jets – An Astonishingly Badly Remixed CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Zappa Available Now

The album was reissued on CD in 1985, and almost all of the rhythm tracks were re-recorded at that time. Since all of the reissues that followed have contained the new versions of the material, early pressings of this album, such as this one, are the only way to hear this album the way it was originally recorded.

I made the mistake of buying the new CD and was appalled — yes, that’s the right word for it — by both the modernized sound and the wrong-headed re-recording of the rhythm tracks.

The only way to hear this music properly is on the early Blue Label Verve LP. (more…)

Dixie Chicken – Our Shootout Winner from 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

White Hot Stamper sound on side two — yes, it is possible, and this very copy is Proof with a capitol P.

Most copies of this album sound like cardboard, especially the later pressings on the palm tree and tan labels.

To get the best sound you need originals of this album, and Warner Brothers green label originals are getting pretty darn hard to find as more and more collectors and audiophiles are coming to the realization that the unending stream of heavy vinyl reissues flooding the market leaves a lot to be desired. (Our desire for them is at zero as we no longer bother to order the stuff.)

Folks, this is no demo disc by any means, but the later pressings strip away the two qualities that really make this music work and bring it to life: Tubey Magic and Big Bass. This side two has both in SPADES.

Listen to how breathy and transparent the chorus is on the first track. Now layer that sound on top of a fat and punchy bottom end and you have the formula for Little Feat Magic at its funky best. This is the sound they heard in the control room, of that I have no doubt, and it is all over this side two. No side of any copy we played was better.

This is A Triple Plus As Good As It Gets Little Feat Sound, the best we have ever heard for any of the early albums.

That WB Sound

Side one earned a grade of A+ to A++. It lacked the top end that lets the sound open up in the choruses, a very common problem with early WB pressings which have a marked tendency to be dull. (We know; we’ve played them by the hundreds, from Deep Purple to the Doobie Brothers to America to Van Morrison and scores of others too numerous to mention. There are ten dull WB pressings for every one that’s bright. )

The bass is excellent and the piano really sounds right on Dixie Chicken, but when you flip the record over you will hear what it could have sounded like (and practically never does).

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Tchaikovsky / Romeo & Juliet – On the Orange Label?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classical Masterpieces Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This is a very old review from from way back in 2011 which we think is wildly off the mark.

I can’t remember when was the last time we played an Mercury Orange Label pressing that had sound competitive with the best earlier pressings.

Back in 2011 we liked reissue pressings of Golden Age recordings a lot more than we do now, so take the review below with a huge grain of salt. Only the advent of top quality cleaning equipment and much improved playback made it possible for us to hear the earlier pressings in all their glory.

A lot of records that I used to like because they were cleaner and brighter — later Red Seal Living Stereos, some OJC jazz, some reissues of rock — sounded much better when my system was darker and less revealing.

There are plenty of live and learn entries about these records. This one from 14+ years ago could (probably, the record is long gone and not around to be played) not be more wrong.

Our advice in 2025 would be to avoid any pressing on the Orange Mercury label.

We played an Orange label late reissue of this title a while back and had this to say about it:

DEMO QUALITY thanks to superb low distortion mastering. Another very exciting Mercury recording. Some of these Orange Label pressings, which are cut with much better cutting equipment than was available when the original album was released, can show you just how good the master tape really is.

This kind of sound is not easy to cut, and it appears that the amplifiers of the day just weren’t up to it. This copy gets rid of all the cutter-head distortion and coloration and allows you to hear what the Mercury engineers accomplished.

Dorati breathes fire into the famous Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet on side 2. Unfortunately, the mastering on this copy is not very good. The sound is bright and dry.

This work frequently is recorded with harsh sound; the orchestration must be difficult to capture on tape. But Mercury here seems to have managed a feat few others can claim. I’m guessing the earlier pressings have too much cutter distortion to get this one right; I don’t recall the other copies I’ve heard sounding this good.

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F for Consistency – Verve on Vinyl

The commentary below is a bit out of date. Now that we can clean and play every label’s pressings much better than before, some of this commentary is harsher than it needs be and should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, there are still an awful lot of badly mastered and badly pressed Verve LPs of excellent Verve recordings, which may be good for our business but is nevertheless frustrating when it comes time to do the shootouts for them.

Verve is probably the most poorly mastered label in the history of the world. No other record label that I know of was responsible for so many wonderful sounding recordings which so often turned into lousy sounding LPs. I could list them for days.

For years we would not pick up most Verve titles at anything but a dirt-cheap price, having been burned so many times before. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to play another badly-mastered, noisy LP. Who has the time?

The commentary below concerns a wonderful Wes Montgomery album on Verve. It tells a story that is all too common in our experience: how the typical Verve pressing is so awful it’s hard to believe we would make the mistake of continuing to buy them, seemingly throwing good money after bad.

But we did keep buying them, we hung in there, and from time to time — against all odds — we would stumble upon a wonderful sounding Verve LP. Some Verve pressings were so much better than we could have ever imagined — based on the dismal pressings we’d played before — we had no choice but to call them Hot Stampers. What else could they be? (more…)

Which Epic Labels for 12 Dreams Have the Best Sound?

More of the Music of Spirit

Here is some moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.

Don’t bother with the black label Epic reissues. In our experience they are consistently awful.

Yellow is the original label and orange the first reissue; both can be good.

The reviews reproduced below tell the story of the album far better than I can. If you like Pink Floyd, The Beatles (circa Revolver and Pepper), and the myriad other bands who took off in the direction of Psych Rock and Art Rock, you should find much to like here.

And if you don’t we give you your money back.

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A Ten to Twenty Dollar Used Record? Yeah, We Know Already

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

You would have to go through at least a dozen or more copies of Rumours to even hope to find one in a league with our best pressings. That’s a lot of record hunting, record cleaning and record playing!

If you know anything about this record, you know that the average domestic pressing of this album is quite average sounding; the good ones are few and far between.

And the stampers, as we’ve come to learn, aren’t the whole story. For one thing, there are at least 75 different side ones and 75 different side twos, all cut by Ken Perry at Capitol on the same three cutters from — we’re assuming, we weren’t there — the same tapes.

But of course they all sound different. Ken also cut the original English and Japanese pressings; his KP is in the dead wax for all to see. The two import KP copies that I heard were quite good, by the way. Not the best, but very good. He only cut the originals though, so practically every import copy you can find will be a reissue made from a dub, ugh.

A Ten to Twenty Dollar Used Record? Yeah, We Know Already

So if you’re the kind of person who likes to complain about us charging hundreds of dollars for a record that can be found in every used bin in town for under twenty, save yourself some typing: that’s the price we pay too.

And if the copy you paid fifteen bucks for sounds good enough, more power to you. Go with god, as they say.

But if your copy doesn’t thrill you — and it’s unlikely that it does — then you have a lot of work ahead of you if you expect to find one that sounds like ours. We wish you well. We wish everybody who likes to do his own shootouts well.

We know the kind of time and energy it takes to find great records, probably better than anyone on the planet. If you have that kind of time and energy available to you, go for it. It takes us a staff of six and access to all the records in the record capitol of the world to pull it off, with thirty years experience doing it no less.

But it can be done, and you can do it. You just have to be willing to put in the time and effort. The records are cheap, right? Fifteen bucks each, we know already.

A Copy with the “Wrong” Label Won Our Shootout in 2009

More of the Music of Steely Dan

As of 2023, the yellow label reissues are no longer competitive with the right black label originals. They can still be very good sounding, but they can’t win shootouts, or at least they haven’t in a very long while. Anything is possible, but not any such thing is likely.

Our review from 2009:

It’s time for our annual Countdown to Ecstasy — whatever that is — and for 2009 this copy took TOP HONORS with superb sound on both sides! We just finished doing a huge shootout for this album with well over a dozen copies, winnowed down from close to twenty at the start, and the winner and new champion is this very copy — on the yellow label no less!

We had done shootouts in the past in which all the best copies of this album were on the black label, but this time around the yellow labels came out victorious.

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Why Has Nobody (Besides Us) Noticed that Side One Is Often Mono?

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More of the Music of It’s a Beautiful Day

This Super Hot Stamper Red Label pressing gives you most of the 360 Label’s rich, Tubey Magical sound, and that’s saying a lot; most red label pressings of this record are absolute junk. About half of the side ones are in MONO — how about that! Who knew, right?

Just did a search and cannot find a single mention of this fact.

Seems that someone should have noticed it by now (besides us of course).

How critically can music lovers and audiophiles be listening to their records if they don’t notice such a glaringly obvious change in the sound?

Here’s what we had to say about a copy on our site a while back:

Going through our clean 360 label pressings (which aren’t cut quite as loud by the way so watch out when doing your own shootouts), we found one that was better and one that was worse. Others were just too noisy. This red label pressing was BY FAR THE BEST of the red label reissues, with A++ sound on both sides that frankly took us by surprise.

As we so often say, Who knew? Now that we’ve heard red labels that sound this good we are on the hunt! They can be found, and they’re usually not in trashed condition the way the 360s are.

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