Welcome to the World of Better Records
The best part of our job is when we manage to discover even better pressings of favorite albums than the ones we had previously thought were the best.
Doing new shootouts for the same titles year after year — sometimes twice a year, as is the case with most of albums by The Beatles, sometimes once every ten years as happens with many of the rarer titles we do — we often find ourselves learning something new by continuing to audition new batches of familiar records.
Yes, we actually love proving ourselves wrong and we go out of our way every day to do it in our Hot Stamper shootouts.
It might be a good idea here to point out that blinded, carefully-controlled shootouts are the only way to prove anything when it comes to records, as they are the only source of real evidence to judge the strengths and weaknesses of records. Opinions are not evidence of anything and are almost always worth exactly what you pay for them.
As Jonathan Swift famously remarked:
“You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.”
The other best part of the job is discovering great recordings of wonderful music that most people have never heard of, some of which can be found here.
For those of you interested in classical and orchestral discoveries — we call them “sleeper” pressings — go here.
Yes, That’s Me
The guy you see pictured above with an old London Rachmaninoff album under his arm has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem).
Before that he wandered around stores that were selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.
He would spend a great deal of time with his newly-purchased records, playing them over and over again on the best stereo equipment he could afford.
He thinks everyone would be better off spending more of their time playing records, especially old ones.
For every twenty records he bought, he would consider himself lucky to end up falling in love with one. The vast majority of those “best of twenty” titles have somehow stood the test of time and continue to be played regularly to this day.
Roughly 275 of those Desert Island Discs have been identified to date.
About 50 of them are currently available in Hot Stamper form on the site as of the date of this post.