Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now
A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced like this:
If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is.
A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).
After hearing so much buzz about it, we finally broke down and ordered a German TML pressing about a year ago. Having played scores of phenomenally good sounding copies of the album over the past fifteen or so years, we were very skeptical that anyone could cut the record better than the mastering engineers who inscribed Rolling Stones Records into the dead wax on the early pressings. (I could find no mastering engineers credited.)
Well, the results were not good. As we suspected would be the case, we were not impressed in the least with what The Mastering Lab — one of the greatest independent cutting houses of all time, mind you — had wrought.
Their version is not really even good enough to charge money for. It might have earned a grade of One Plus, just under the threshold for a Hot Stamper that we would put on the site these days. Decent, but not much more than that.
Wait, There’s More
We subsequently learned that it is the British TML pressings that are supposed to be the best.
So we got one of those in, an A3/B4 copy.
Better, but good enough? Barely.
Here are the notes for the copy we played. For those who have trouble reading our writing, I have transcribed the notes as follows:
Side One
Track one:
Weighty, a bit veiled or smeary. Backing vox kinda lost.
Track three:
Very full, rockin’ but not the sparkle/space.
Kinda compressed.
Not as huge.
Side Two
Track two:
Not as rich, clear.
A bit pushy/dry vox.
No real space.
Thick drums
Track one:
This works better.
A bit hard, but full and lively.
This Sound?
Is this the sound audiophiles are raving about?