rolling-stones-letters

Letter of the Week – “You guys aren’t kidding… blew me away.”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing of Their Satanic Majesties Request he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Just played Their Satanic Majesties Request that I received from you. You guys aren’t kidding. The copy is excellent – blew me away. It replaces my original copy (with the 3D photo). I have a pretty good system, and it really stood out – lots of detail and quite a few surprises.

Thanks for curating such great vinyl.

Rodney

Rodney,

Thanks for your letter. The originals we’ve played are simply not competitive with the best sounding reissues, which is why we sell the best sounding reissues for more money than the originals.

Anybody can buy an original. Only somebody who does rigorous shootouts of multiple pressings from different eras can know which are the best sounding pressings of any given album (keeping in mind that the results from any given shootout, like any scientific finding, are provisional.)

You came to the right place for the best sound and you got it.

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Letter of the Week – “I haven’t felt better listening to an album in decades.”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

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

Hey Tom,  

Just a quick note to thank you for the extraordinary copy of “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.” I won’t enumerate all the remarkable qualities of the pressing since you know them well. I’ll just say that I haven’t felt better listening to an album in decades. What a remarkable experience.

By the way, since I bought this as a birthday present for my brother please let me know if another copy of equal or better quality becomes available. You know how this copy made my Londons and Japanese pressing sound. (more…)

Talk About Getting the Sound Wrong – What Was Decca Thinking?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Even though we know that the UK Decca pressings have not done well in our shootouts for more years than I care to remember, if we see one for cheap locally you know we’re going to buy it and get it another chance at the brass ring no matter how many times it’s failed in the past.

As you can see from our shootout notes, the Decca import has once again let us down.

It’s bright, with no warmth or weight. It’s not musical like the London pressings with the right stampers are.

If a certain kind of audiophile were to play this record, the kind of audiophile who might be given to simplistic conclusions based on insufficiently small sets of data — which, in our experience, pretty much covers the entire audiophile record collector community, including, if not especially, the so-called expert reviewers — the conclusion such a person might reach is that Beggars Banquet is just not very well recorded.

If Decca pressings don’t sound good, what on earth would?

Or, to put it another way, if Decca, the label that the Stones recorded this album for, can’t figure out how to make Beggars sound its best, why would we assume that any other company could?

We would, naturally, assume that Decca did the best they could with the tape and the mediocre quality of the sound you hear — 1+/1.5+ is pretty much our definition of mediocre — is all there is.

The Option that Is Almost Always Wrong

Worse — if a new Heavy Vinyl pressing of the album came out with even halfway-decent sound, then it would prove beyond a doubt that some modern mastering engineer had finally figured out how to get Beggars to sound right.

But of course it would prove no such thing.

If all you have to guide you is conventional collector wisdom, then the one thing you can be sure of is that the Decca pressing from the UK should have better sound than any other, especially any record made in the states.

But it doesn’t. It’s possible I suppose – we haven’t played every pressing ever made – but it sure is unlikely based on the evidence presented to our ears over the course of the last twenty to thirty years or so.

If you would like to hear Beggars Banquet sound right, and have the hundreds of dollars we charge for a copy that is guaranteed to sound right or your money back, click on the link. It’s rare that we have one in stock, but you never know.

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Letter of the Week – “I had NO IDEA there was this much difference between copies.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The  Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

Wow! this copy of Exile on MS is amazing! It sounded fantastic before my amps even were warm.

The drums sound like they are in the same room as the room with the microphone; the horns sound like……. well like… horns.

The copy I had before was brand new and sucked. This $350 copy is worth the dough and I am surprised. I am tempted to stop buying vinyl at all unless it has been pre-tested by your team (this will be tough). 

I had NO IDEA there was this much difference between copies.

Brian S. 

Brian,

Thanks for your letter.

Now you know what we know, that there is a huge difference between pressings of an album like Exile on Main Street, and the only way to find the good ones is to keep playing copy after copy until you luck into one.

Here is how we described one we found in one of our recent shootouts:

    • The better copies are also much less gritty and hard, but manage to keep the raw, grungy, heavily tube-compressed sound the Stones and their exceptionally talented engineer, Glyn Johns, were going for
    • The sound may be too grungy for some, making Exile fairly difficult to reproduce, but the best sounding pressings — played at good, loud levels on big dynamic speakers, in a large, heavily-treated room — are a blast

The harder you work to get distortion out of your system and room, the more enjoyable you will find this album, which is exactly the reason you want to do all that work in the first place — in order to get the most out of difficult-to-reproduce albums like Exile.

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Letter of the Week – “I have been listening to a first pressing Decca, but your copy made it sound egregiously insipid.”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

This LET IT BLEED is a gorgeous monster. Everything just jumps off the page, so to speak. I have been listening to a first pressing Decca, which I have owned for years, but your copy made it sound egregiously insipid. As I kept turning up the volume, the room seemed to be nodding its head and egging me on to keep increasing it. I never reached the point where too much was too much. Great copy.

The Mahavishnu EMERALD was brilliant. It brought out all the exciting dimensions of my system. The exquisite strings floated above the musical melee which tattooed its obligato deliriously across its raucous underbelly. The sound reached out like tongues of flame making the speakers completely disappear in their rocking wake.

This is an amazing record that projects and dances the music in every direction and then some. Everything is alive. So completely alive. A real treat. A great recording that tells me my system is completely responsive.

Phil

Phil,

We’ve known for a very long time — since roughly 2005 — what an awful pressing the original mono Decca is of the album.

When we last heard one, it did not evn pass the laugh test, and we never bought another.

Even the original Decca stereo pressings of the album are not that good, and at the prices being charged these days, a very poor choice if you want the best sound.

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Letter of the Week – “This one is great — involving, NOT smeared, 3-D — most of all it invites me in…”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I bought the Sticky you suggested (seemed like a dare). Like I said, I have several pressings, including the horrible MFSL. This sounds better than all of them, by far. My sense is that it’s a tough album, deliberately a bit muddy and smeared and inconsistent from track to track, which made the quest even more appealing. This one is great; involving, NOT smeared, 3D — most of all it invites me in, instead of saying “OK, this may be a bit cloudy, but try to enjoy anyway.”

I’m on my 5th listen. And Catch Bull at Four is also seriously good. Such an underrated album. I’ll be back, inasmuch as most of my other vinyl sounds flaccid compared to these.

John

John,

Thanks for your letter. You are spot on with your observation about the sound being deliberately muddy.

Glyn Johns loves his tube compressors. They can make some tracks murkier than many of us would like, but they work positive wonders most of the time.

A lot of the smearing you reference is from uncleaned or improperly cleaned vinyl. Once we got our cleaning regimen dialed in, a lot of the smear we used to hear so often on old records stopped being a problem.

3-Dimensionality also greatly improves with clean, fully-restored vinyl.

A lot of old records just sound like old records until you figure out how to clean them right.

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Letter of the Week – “When I think of all the money I’ve spent on those sites…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I just wanted to thank you for the expedited shipping for The Stones Exile on Main Street that I recently purchased.

I look forward to my next purchase from you, especially since I never buy from Acoustic Sounds, Music Direct, or eBay anymore. When I think of all the money I’ve spent on those sites…

Cordially,
Christopher

Christopher,

Happy to get you the record quickly, glad UPS is doing its job.

As for the other record dealers you mention, it is indeed sad that so much money is being wasted on so much bad vinyl.

But whose fault is that, really? How many audiophiles have heard of us and yet never tried one of our Hot Stampers?

At least 98% would be my guess.

Mediocrity is the operating principle which governs the world. Most folks will never go beyond the average, and as far as I can tell, that’s just fine by them.

Some come to know better, and it’s good that you are one of those lucky few. Hearing is believing, and once you’ve heard the difference, buying Heavy Vinyl pressings from the hacks who sell them would be like taking a giant step backward in your audio journey.

Almost like starting over, but now with a low ceiling that you will never be able to break through.

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Who Deserves the Credit for Knocking this Sticky Fingers Pressing Out of the Park?

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

All time world champ.  A cut above unbelievable!  All the magic sans the shrillness so common in the multitudinous copies I’ve heard.  Breathtaking finesse and musicianship exploding in holographic dynamics that are clean and tonally real and penetrating.  

What a copy.  Pure gold.  Thank you Tom.  You knocked it out of the park.

Phil

Dear Phil,

Fantastic news. We loved it too.

A small correction, if I may:

Some mastering engineer knocked it out of the park. All we did was find the ball, grab it and run with it.

And if you want to find the killer pressing that can sail over the back wall with ease, possibly landing in the bed of a pickup truck never to be seen again, there is only one way we know of to do it: by turning over lots of rocks.

Some of the rocks we turned over for our first big shootout many years ago can be seen in the picture below.

It was taken in the early- to mid-2000s. By that time I had been buying up Sticky Fingers in local record stores for more than twenty years. I didn’t have much to show for my efforts, however, as the records were just too noisy, scratched-up, groove-distorted and just plain bad sounding to qualify for a shootout.

It wasn’t until 2007, with the discovery of the Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System and the Odyssey record cleaning machine (similar to Keith Monks’ design from the 70s that I used to use) that we were finally able to get Sticky Fingers to sound good enough and play quietly enough to identify the Hot Stamper pressings lurking in the pile of copies you see below.

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Letter of the Week – “I have NEVER had such a big smile on my face while listening to this epic album.”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

Our new customer Michel wrote to tell us how much he likes his Super Hot Stamper pressing of Sticky Fingers.

Hi Tom,

Fifty two years ago when I was eleven I got given a little Sony cassette player and 4 cassettes. One of them was Sticky Fingers. Needless to say, I have listened to that album for five decades, as I am 63 now. I’ve listened to countless different pressings in that time span.

I have NEVER ever had such a big smile on my face, eyes shut, in absolute bliss, totally engrossed in how incredibly full and lush the sounds were, while listening to this epic album.

‘I Got The Blues‘ blew my brain it sounded so good.

That luscious warmth in perfect balance with the vocals and all the other instruments besides bass, guitar, drums.

The highs all there…no shrillness whatsoever…everything clear and precise…simultaneously within that warmth. It is a TRUE pleasure to listen to this lp…unmatched by endless other copies.

I feel so lucky to be having this experience. It is that good. I feel privileged to be in the presence of such sound. It is very healing!!

My parents were both classical musicians (violin and piano) and I got played classical music during mealtime as a baby…don’t know if that developed my ears and subsequent pleasure from beautiful sounds or not, but it sure feels like it.

This SHS is really something special. Many Many thanks to you and your crew, as you all have brought much joy into my life.

Michel

Michel,

Thanks for your enthusiatic letter!

Bringing joy into our customers’ lives is something we are fortunate to be able to do.

All the way back in 2007, after playing the Hoffman-Gray remastered Blue, we asked ourselves what was the point of these nothingburger records.

Do they bring anyone even a fraction of the joy the real thing could?

The answer was obvious even back then.

As you know firsthand, the attempts by other labels to remaster Sticky Fingers have been quite a bit less successful than Blue (which, truth be told, isn’t half-bad).

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Letter of the Week – “Then I did Street Fighting Man. The BR copy destroyed the other two!”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

Our new customer Michel wrote to tell us how much he likes his Super Hot Stamper pressing of Beggars Banquet.

Hi Tom,

Doing that shootout was really interesting. I had culled the two best I had some months ago which were two old London presses (one TH and one Monarch). So I mixed those two up so I didn’t know which was which, and then the BR copy would be third on the table.

I did Sympathy for the Devil first. I actually preferred one of my copies (monarch) for that track as the tone
of the bass was a little more forward which I really like for that one song.

Then I did Street Fighting Man. The BR copy destroyed the other two!

What a pleasure it was
to hear that song at max volume with everything just right. Turn it up more!

That was definitely the very best I’d ever heard that song in 63 years. Well done BR!Michel

Michel,

Michel,

I would agree with you that Street Fighting Man is the better test. It’s easy to be thrown off by one aspect or another of the sound of a particular track. We always use at least two in our shootouts and oftentimes three is better.

The production is heavy on strummed acoustic guitars. Those are a good test for any record.

No Expectations would have been my first choice, but the rockers are important for energy, weight, size and power, so you really have to play a number of tracks to know which pressings get Beggars right.

Thanks for your enthusiatic letter.

Best, TP

PS

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 99% of the time.

It is not the least bit unusual for our customers to take another listen and become more aware of the superior sound of the Hot Stamper pressings the second time around.

When we do lose a shootout, we promptly refund the buyer’s money and wish him or her a nice day.

What do we do with the record, assuming the customer had no problem with its playing condition?

We put it right back up on the site to sell to the next customer who might want it. In only two or three cases did it ever come back to us again. Two or three out of thousand and thousands of Hot Stampers sold. Not bad.

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