regular-shootouts

As explained in these commentaries, regular shootouts are the best way to improve the sound of the albums in your collection.

Mobile Fidelity Actually Produced a New and Improved Deja Vu in 1983

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

A letter came to us years ago with the comment “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

As the time I made some of the following comments in reply and have added a few new ones since then.

Deja Vu is indeed a very special album, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, playing over and over on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

13 Years Go By

Time went by and then, oddly enough, my love for the music was reignited by a pressing that came out 13 years after the album’s first release, on a label you may be familiar with, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs.

I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound.

This is not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are, but let us give credit where credit is due. With the volume cranked good and loud,  I often played the first track, Carry On, using the MoFi pressing to demonstrate how smooth, rich, big, powerful and dynamic my system could sound.

“The CD may be taking over the world,” I would say, because by 1983 that was exactly what was happening, “but you”ll never hear a CD that sounds like this!”

13 More Years Go By

It would take me many years, at least another 13 or so, to come across the domestic reissues that trounced the MoFi and showed me how colored, compressed, thick, blurry and recessed their pressing was.

Here is the real shocker from that time: I actually thought that the extremely hard-to-find reissue I’d discovered was so flukishly good that it could never be beaten by any other pressing!

(To be fair, my long-time audiophile buddy Robert Pincus probaby deserves the credit for finding it. He found a great many special pressings for me back when I was buying records from him, reaching all the way back to 1987.)

Which is yet another example of everything being relative. I admit I had a poor understanding of that vitally important concept at the time. I really had no idea how good a recording Deja Vu was, and I didn’t really have a way to find out because many of the most important revolutions in audio had not been incorporated into my system, or had yet to be invented.

Within the last five years or so another domestic pressing, and now most recently an import (!), have come to be seen as clearly superior to all of these.

This is the result of having never given up the search for a better Deja Vu.

Record Collecting in My World

Anticipating the release of the newest Half-Speed remastered pressing that would deliver me from the evils of the garden-variety domestic or import LP I happened to own was the dominant feature of my record collecting world in the 70s and 80s.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to learn that almost none of those “new and improved” pressings would pass the test of time. This is an idea I first came to appreciate in the 90s and one that has become more true with each passing year.

With the increasing proliferation of one Heavy Vinyl mediocrity after another, in 2007 we finally recognized we had a duty to our customers to stand athwart audio history and yell “Stop.”

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In 2016 We Had to Raise the Bar for Wings at the Speed of Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Okay, we’re not too proud to admit it.

We was wrong about Wings at the Speed of Sound as a recording.

Yes, that kind of thing happens when you regularly play thousands and thousands of records year after year.

The right pressing can show you that your understanding of a given recording is, shall we say, incomplete.

The great thing about our business is that, whenever we have new data that serves to correct a past mistaken judgment, the result is that we are then able to offer even better sounding pressings to our customers.

That way everybody wins. We’ve never pretended to know it all, and there’s no reason for us to start now.

Back to Wings at the Speed of Sound. Previously we had written:

I can’t even begin to convey to you what a rough shootout this was. Copy after copy bored us to tears and most of them were too noisy. It was one of those shootouts that almost defeated us, but we persevered and managed to find a few Hot Stampers. They didn’t do miracles and turn Speed Of Sound into a stunning Demo Disc, but they sounded musical, correct and enjoyable, and that seems to be all you can ask for on this album. 

This is not true.

We played a copy that earned our very special grade of Four Pluses (on one side, two sides would have been too much to ask for) because it showed us an At the Speed of Sound that we had no idea could possibly exist, this after having played dozens of imports and domestic pressings over the previous twenty years or so.

It was DRAMATICALLY bigger and more transparent, with no sacrifice in richness or smoothness.

Here was a very different Wings at the Speed of Sound. Why did it take us so long to find it?

We had never managed to clean and play a copy with the right stampers that could show us the brilliance of the sound that must be on the master tape. We needed to do more research and development, which of course we are in the habit of doing regularly with Classic Rock records, our bread and butter and the heart of our business.

Before we did this shootout, we had no idea how high to set the bar. Which leads us to:

This Key Takeaway 

In that respect we were in exactly the same place as every record loving audiophile on the face of the Earth.

How good can the record sound? How high is up?

We discussed this all-too-common mystery [1] in a listing we wrote for an amazing sounding copy of Heart’s Little Queen album we discovered many years ago, linked here.

In our old listing, we noted: Now that we know what stampers to look for, future pressings are likely to be very, very good sounding, if everything goes the way we hope it will.

[Things did go our way, with plenty of Shootout Winning White Hot copies having been found since we made that breakthrough all the way back in 2016. The right stampers are about five times more rare than the wrong ones, but they can be found. You just have to know what to look for.] 

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We Was Wrong about Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Albums Available Now

My history with Led Zeppelin’s seventh album is a classic case of me mistakenly blaming the recording.

In our listings for Presence from about fifteen years ago (a lifetime in audio, at least for us) we noted:

“By the way, Royal Orleans (at the end of side one) never sounds good; it’s always grainy. Same story with the intro to Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It sounds like groove damage, but since it’s on every last one of our domestic copies (the only ones that have the potential to sound amazing in our experience) we know it has to be a pressing problem and not a problem with the individual copies. It’s a shame, but the rest of the songs here all sound amazing.”

This is no longer true, or at least the part about Nobody’s Fault But Mine being grainy or distorted isn’t, since I didn’t test Royal Orleans this time around.

I had just put in a fresh Dynavector 17d3 two days before and spent almost three hours getting the setup dialed in. In fact, it was so right when I was done that I spent the next three or four hours experimenting with room treatments.

When I was done the changes seemed to have opened up the sound and increased the transparency even further. (I went a little too far and had to dial it back a bit, but that’s not at all unusual in my experience.)

Wait a Minute

So now I’m reading about the problems we used to encounter with Nobody’s Fault and thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. I didn’t hear any grain or distortion. Not on the good copies anyway.”

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard those problems is that over the last year or so we’d fixed them.

How I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better.

Or maybe it was that in combination with a few new room tweaks.

Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know.

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A Pink Label Island LP Left Us with Egg on Our Face

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Traffic Available Now

We used to think that The Best of Traffic had better sound than the early pressings of Mr. Fantasy, but in a head to head comparison with a killer copy we played not long ago, we were proved wrong, or, perhaps more accurately, we proved ourselves wrong, something we pride ourselves in being able to do by carrying out regular shootouts for records we’ve been listening to for more than twenty years.

Oddly enough, in our shootouts we often learn new things about records we thought we knew well.

Here is what we had to say about one of the tracks on Mr. Fantasy that we thought sounded dramatically better on The Best of Traffic back around 2005:

Best evidence: Heaven Is In Your Mind, the second track on side one. It is amazing sounding here and such a disappointment on every Pink Label Island original we’ve played.

Once you know how good that song can sound — by playing a Hot Stamper copy of Best of Traffic like this one — going back to the original version of the song found on the album is not just a letdown, it’s positively painful. Where’s the analog magic? The weight to the piano? The startling clarity and super-spaciousness of the soundfield? The life and energy of the performance?

They’re gone, brother. Not entirely gone, mind you, more a shadow of what they should be, but once you’ve heard the real thing it’s not a lot of fun listening to a shadow.

You can be sure that we did not know what we were talking about when we wrote all that.

What we had done is assumed that all the pink label pressings of Mr. Fantasy sounded like the one we played, something we’ve been telling audiophiles for twenty years not to do, because collecting records by label is a fool’s game.

In this case, clearly we are the fools.

It probably — probably, since all the evidence points in the same direction — had the stampers you see below, apparently known as an Orlake Pressing, something I knew nothing about until reading about it on Discogs just now.

  • Matrix / Runout (Side A, stamped): ILPS+9061+A
  • Matrix / Runout (Side B, stamped): ILPS+9061+B

These same stampers would be used to press the Pink Rim Label copy you see below. We put it into a recent shootout and described it as having “hollow, dubby” sound.

Yes, we heard the very same “dubby” sound on a copy we played about twenty years ago, and thought all the early pressings on Island, pink and pink rim alike, had these same mastering shortcomings.

Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right UK pressings on Island of Mr. Fantasy are dramatically better sounding.

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Letter of the Week – “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Tom, I just listened to the White Hot Stamper (A+++) CSNY album.

Amazing. I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound. Worth every penny.

The sound at low volume is amazing. The sound at high volume is spectacular.

The clarity, the depth, the soundstage are very rich and alive with color and presence.

Thank you! I am now going to investigate your piece on the cleaning process.

Rocco

Rocco,

Glad you liked this copy as much as we did! Deja Vu is indeed a very special album, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

Years went by and then, oddly enough, my love for the music was reignited by a pressing that came out 13 years after the album’s first release, on a label you may have heard of, Mobile Fidelity.

I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound. (Not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are.)

It would take me and my staff many years, at least another 13 or so, to come across the domestic reissues that trounced the MoFi and showed me how colored, compressed, thick, blurry and limited it was.

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The Warm Moods – The Reissue Is So Good, How Can the Original Be Better?

Hot Stamper Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Our review from years ago for the Discovery reissue of The Warm Moods can be found below.

We loved the sound, so much so that we found it hard to fault.

Imagine our surprise when we discoverd that that the original was clearly better.

Much better. At least a full grade better.

When we did the shootout again, a rare (in stereo anyway) original Reprise showed us just how wrong we were.

The best original pressing we found took the sound of The Warm Moods to another level, and a pretty high one at that.

It’s yet another example in which the most important question in all of audio had been overlooked: compared to what?

Who knew the recording could sound any better than the wonderful Discovery pressing we’d played?

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How Novel Patterns Emerge During Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

When you sit down to play ten or twelve copies of an album, one right after the other, patterns in the sound are going to emerge from that experience, patterns which would be very likely to pass unnoticed when playing one copy against another or two over the course of the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to do it.

In the case of this album, the pattern we perceived was simply this: About one or two out of that dozen or so will have punchy, solid, rich, deep bass. (There is a huge amount of bass on the recording, so recognizing those special copies is not the least bit difficult if you have a full-range speaker and a properly treated room.)

About one or two copies really get the top end right, which is easily heard when the cymbals splash dynamically, with their harmonics intact, and they extend high about the rest of the soundfield (precisely the way they do in live music).

(Fewer copies have an extended top end compared to those with tight punchy bass by the way.)

Like so many Mastering Lab tube-mastered records from the era, most copies tend to be somewhat smooth.

Only one copy had both the best bass and the best highs.

All the other copies fell short in one or both of these areas.

Think about it: if you do your home shootouts with three or four or even five copies of an album, what are the chances that:

1. You will detect this pattern? Or,
2. That you will run into the one copy that does it all?

This is precisely the reason we have taken the concept of doing comparisons between pressings to an entirely new level.

It’s the only way to find the outliers in the group, the “thin tails” as the statisticians like to call them. (More on outliers here.)

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The Planets – Not As Good As We Thought, Sorry!

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

This listing from 2008 has not aged well. We no longer recommend this performance of The Planets.

If you want to give one a try, make sure to get one on the Large Tulips label. The reissues tend to be thin and harsh.

Our current favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.

Notes from an Old Shootout

Side one here is AGAIG, as good as it gets. It shows the listener more of everything that’s wonderful about this wondrous work.

Side two is very nearly as good, and was only beaten slightly by one other copy in our shootout. This pressing gives you the complete work in the best sound we can find. 

This was one long shootout, two and a half years in the making.

And I spent at least ten years before that collecting enough copies to be able to find some pattern in the stampers that clued me in as to what to look for.

It was a long time coming but we expect you will find it was all worth it in the end. This music is so important and moving; it belongs in every audiophile’s collection.

To get Steinberg’s version into your collection has not been easy, until now. This is the one.

UPDATE

As it turns out, as our stereo improved, we realized this recording, even on the best pressings, was not the one.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels. “Advanced” is a code word for having little to no interest in any remastered pressing marketed to the audiophile community.

Stand Up – Notes from 2009

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Available Now

Our last shootout for Stand Up was over a year ago, early in 2008. By some good fortune we have been able to find a number of fairly clean early British pressings, with both Pink and Sunray labels, as well as some very good sounding domestics. (Yes, they are out there. Few and far between and probably not the ones you would think to buy but out there nonetheless. Buy enough of them and clean them right and you will find some too.)

UPDATE 2025:

We no longer buy domestic pressings of Stand Up. They sound like they are made from second-generation tapes, with the smear and the lack of transparency that are the hallmarks of records mastered from copy tapes.

We did make one very important discovery this time around.

We found a Pink Label copy with a side two that beat all three of the Sunray pressings we had on hand, a copy that made us lower the grade of this very record to Two and a Half Pluses after playing it. Here is our now somewhat mistaken commentary from the last listing we did for a $750 Hot Stamper: 

The Sunray copies CAN and DO beat the best British originals when you get a good one, and this is a very good one. In our many (25+) years of experience with Stand Up vinyl we can tell you categorically that there is no earlier import pressing, no later import pressing, and no domestic pressing of any era that can compete with the sound of this LP. It was well over a year ago that we found the last one that sounded like this, and we don’t expect to find another one anytime soon. They’re a fluke. There are many sonic problems with this recording, but most of them disappear when you get a truly Hot Stamper copy like this one.

Perhaps categorically was poorly chosen. One should rarely be categorical about record pressings, since one is in no position to play them all or to have perfect equipment with which to play them.

Let’s not worry about that now. Let’s talk about this copy. The sound is amazingly dynamic and powerful, yet overflowing with tubey magic. We played almost ten different copies of this record this week (February 2009), every domestic Reprise label variation and close to a half dozen Pink and Sunray label British imports. (No more German pressings for us; they never seem to cut it so we are giving up on that country for Jethro Tull. Pink Floyd and The Beatles, yes, German pressings can be amazing. But for Island label records, Gemany was just not getting good tapes, if our experience is any guide.)

This copy was CLEARLY the best of the batch. Side one just JUMPS TO LIFE right out of the gate. Master Tape Sound is the only way to describe it. You will simply be amazed at how good this record can sound. It belongs in our Top 100 with sound like this.

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