regular-shootouts

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

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.

(more…)

The Said and the Unsaid – The Firebird on Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Igor Stravinsky Available Now

For our shootout years ago of The Firebird we had three minty, potentially hot copies of the Mercury with Dorati, as well as our noisy ref. (We have a noisy reference copy for just about every major title now. We have been doing these shootouts for a very long time. After thirty years in the record business we have accumulated a World Class collection of great sounding records that are just too noisy to sell.)

UPDATE 2024 

This is no longer true. Our customers seem to be able to put up with surface noise on the records we offer if the price is low enough. Not actually low, just low enough. We have a section for records with condition issues, and there are 175 entries in it as of today, which turns out to be more than a quarter of all the Hot Stamper pressings on the site as a matter of fact.

We had one FR pressing and two of the later pressings with the lighter label, the ones that most often come with Philips M2 stampers. This is how we described the winner:

So clear and ALIVE. Transparent, with huge hall space extending wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Zero compression.

Lifelike, immediate, front row center sound like few records you have ever heard.

Rich, sweet strings, especially for a Mercury. This side really gets quiet in places, a sure sign that all the dynamics of the master tape were protected in the mastering of this copy.

What we didn’t say — and what we never say in the listings — is what the second tier copies didn’t do as well as the shootout winner.

We used to. When you read the older entries, most of the time they mention the shortcomings that caused one side or another to be downgraded by some amount, usually something like a half to a full plus.

Not all the top end, not all the bass, not as present, slightly smeary, slightly congested — the list of potential faults for any given pressing is long indeed. These are all the problems we listen for and it’s the rare copy that doesn’t suffer from one or more of them.

We decided years ago that it was better just to let you hear the two sides of the record for yourself and make your own judgments about the sound, rather than make clear to you what areas we felt needed improvement.

Consider this example. If on our system the bass was lacking compared to the very best, perhaps on your system the bass was fine, not an issue, good enough. Without the top copy to compare yours to, how would you know how much better the bass could possibly be?

A classic case of “compared to what?”

Shootouts are the only way to answer that question, which, as we never tire of saying, is THE most important question in all of audio. This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Click on the following link to see more records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific copy.

What We Heard on The Firebird

With all that in mind, only the Triple Plus (A+++) copy, as described above, did everything right.

There were two Double Plus (A++) copies, and each of them fell short in different ways.

(more…)

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?

(more…)

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.)

(more…)

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.

(more…)

In Search Of Amazing Mona Bones in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now

Notes from our first shootout, 2007.

Trouble sounds OUT OF THIS WORLD here — it’s rich and sweet with a lovely delicate quality to the acoustic guitar. Just listen to all that room around Cat’s voice!

I Wish I Wish sounds off the charts as well. It’s lively, musical and super transparent with tight bass. It’s rich and full with a wide soundfield. 

There are at least 3 original stampers for both sides one and two.

We’ve spent countless hours on different occasions playing them against each other. It’s very time consuming when you have multiple copies of the same stampers that don’t sound the same. Add to that that we have a couple of nice Import original Sunray pressings, and you have quite a project.

But it was all worth it because I’ve learned a lot, and I’m happy to share with you what I discovered.

To make judgments about the relative merits of each of the pressings, you have to find the right tracks that are the most revealing of the particular side’s strengths and weaknesses.

None of the later pressings I have ever heard sound remotely as good as the right originals. The original British & German imports, of which I have had a few over the years, are decent, but they don’t sound as good as these original domestic copies. They tend to be either too smooth, or too bright and therefore spitty on the vocals.

UPDATE 2023

There are good import pressings of this album. One of them won a shootout a few years back.

In fact, now that I think about it, the best stampers for this record are simply the ones that have the most correct tonal balance from top to bottom. For whatever reason, this record was obviously very difficult to master. (And press for that matter.)

This is the only explanation I have for why it is so difficult to find good sounding copies of this album. There are lots of good copies of Tea and Teaser. Many of them have been put on the site and we still have many more to list.