Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tom Petty Available Now
In 2014 we wrote:
Damn the Torpedoes is the best sounding Tom Petty album we have ever played.
Credit must go to SHELLY YAKUS, someone who we freely admit, now with a sense of embarrassment, has never been one of our favorite engineers.
After hearing this beyond-White Hot Stamper side two and a killer copy of Animal Notes, we realized we’d seriously underestimated the man, and for that we can only apologize.
If your Damn the Torpedoes doesn’t sound good (and it probably doesn’t), you sure can’t blame him — the master tape is mind-boggling in its size, weight, power and rock n’ roll energy.
Our 2014 better than White Hot Stamper copy had the kind of sound we never expected to hear on Damn The Torpedoes, an album that’s typically bright, thin, pinched and transistory — radio friendly but not especially audiophile friendly.
Well folks, all that’s changed, and by “all” I don’t necessarily mean all to include the records themselves. This may very well be a record that sounded gritty and pinched before it was cleaned. And our stereo has come a long way in the last five or ten years, as I hope yours has too.
One sign that you’re making progress in this hobby is that at least some of the records you’ve played recently, records that had never sounded especially good to you before, are now sounding very good indeed.
In our case Damn the Torpedoes is one of those records. It’s the best sounding Tom Petty album we have ever played.
We wrote about another famous rock album that somehow got a whole lot better sounding here. An excerpt:
The recordings don’t change.
Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper revolution is all about.
You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and then just consider the case closed.
You did the right thing, you played by the rules. You bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, and on and on.
Cross that title off and move on to the next, right?
When — sometimes if but usually when — the sound of the record doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it, you merely accept the fact that the recording itself must be at fault.
Prepare to allot a fair amount of time to complaining about such an unfortunate state of affairs. “If only they had recorded the album better…” you say to yourself as you toddle off to bed, ending your listening session prematurely, fatigued and frustrated with a record that — for some reason — doesn’t sound as good as you remember.
We did it too, more times than I care to admit.
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