Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tom Petty Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This commentary was written in 2014 after having played (and finally been able to reproduce) a killer copy of Damn the Torpedoes.
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: