Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now
Below you will see the complete stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.
Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.
We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.
As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” is where we choose to draw it.
How Come?
Since, as we discovered recently, 1s wins, and handily, why would any 1s pressing sound as bad as the one at the bottom does?
(Which by the way is not actually bad — just far from the best.)
If the 1s wins the shootout as it did here, that means that the received knowledge about RCA Living Stereo pressings being better on the first pressing is correct.
But if you are the unlucky buyer of the 1s that did not do nearly as well, you might say to yourself “Hey, I thought the 1s pressing was supposed to be the hot ticket. Wha’ happen?” (Assuming you don’t conclude that the recording is at fault, which is what most audiophiles and record collectors would be likely to do. I did it and I bet you did too.)
We noted in a commentary from many years ago that the record collecting theories we see commonly promoted by those who consider themselves “in the know” seem to have a great deal of trouble accounting for these anomalies.
We had two copies of Court and Spark, each with one good side opposite a bad side on the same pressing. An excerpt: