same-stampers-different-sound

What Good Is Knowing that 2-1B/2-1G Wins Shootouts?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Especially considering the fact that the best copy (3/3) with those stampers earned significantly better grades than the worst copy with those stampers (1.5/1.5)*.

Does anyone have a practical way to get around the confusing and exasperating reality that one set of stampers can sound great and the same or a similar set of stampers can sound not much better than passable? Take a spin and see where the wheel of fortune stops.

To be honest, we can’t say there is a practical way to get around these mysteries, but we do know of an impractical one. We’ve been practicing and refining the impractical one we came up with twenty years ago and, according to our customers, it works like gangbusters.

Turns out that all you have to do  is just play lots and lots of different copies of albums and they will tell you how they sound.

In the case of the record you see below, the copies with the best stampers and the copies with some of the worst stampers had the same stampers.

Here is the full stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did this particular shootout for.

We are not revealing what mystery title had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be somewhat helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for the Scythian Suite Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

When it comes to the Scythian Suite, we’ve decided that there is no good reason to put the Ansermet recordings in our shootouts anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. They are perfectly good records, but the Abbado is a step up both in performance and sound. Our main listening guy summed up the differences of the two recordings this way.

  • I prefer the DG version (2530 967) for sound and performance.
  • The London is very rich and lively but the big drums on the DG are killer, hard to beat!

So, out of the goodness of our hearts, we can now reveal the Shootout Winning stampers: 1W/1W.

However, in the case of CS-6538, knowing the right stampers is not going to get you very far.

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least six copies the way we did.

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Shootout Winning Stampers for The Planets Revealed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Holst Available Now

You may have noticed that on the few occasions when we actually do give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we are loathe to identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a substantial share of the costs we bear, costs that sometimes accrue over the course of many years, decades even. Eventually these costs are passed on to our customers, accounting for some of the admittedly high prices you see on our site.

But this title is going to be an exception, with many more to follow. We are officially giving out stamper information for this London, information that took us more than a decade to acquire. Maybe even two decades.

The right 2W/4W pressings of CS 6734, the Decca recording of Holst’s The Planets conducted by Zubin Mehta, are the best we have ever played. Based on our experience over the years, these are the only stampers that have any chance of winning a shootout.

Below you will find the grades for all the top copies from our most recent efforts, as well as the also-rans with those same stampers that we played.

Only two pressings earned a top grade, and each of them managed to do so on only one side. This is by far the most common result of a shootout. 3+/3+ copies are the exception, not the rule.

Whatever caused the amazing sides of the best pressings to come out differently from the not-nearly-as-good sides of the other pressings must have happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that was of course not under the control of the mastering engineer who cut the record in the UK for Decca, Harry Fisher.

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3s Can Have Amazingly Good Sound, or 3s Can Have Mediocre Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?

Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.

A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.

As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

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It’s Already So Good, How Could It Get Any Better?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

You may have noticed that most of the time when we give out the stampers for the top copies of an album, we do not identify the title of the record that has those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can imagine, our huge investments in research and development make up a big part of our costs, costs that accrue over the course of years, decades even, and that must eventually be passed on to our customers.

But this title is an exception, because we are telling you straight out that the 1K pressings of CS 6101, Music of Berlioz, are the way to go.

It turns out that both the early Decca pressings (SXL 2134) and the London Bluebacks were cut by Tony Hawkins.

It’s unfortunate that this record did not sell well when it came out in 1959, which explains why we could find no evidence of copies with any stampers other than 1K.

Not that the work of any other mastering engineers was in any way needed. Mr. Hawkins did a wonderful job on the copies we played than managed to reproduce the glorious, Golden Age All Tube analog sound of the master tape, which may sound  tautological as all get out but I assure you is not.

No, sadly for us, that glorious sound could be found on one and only one pressing, the one we graded 3+/3+.

No other pressing earned a top grade on either side. Whatever caused the amazing pressings to come out differently from the very good ones happened in the plating and pressing stages of manufacturing, an area that did not involve the work of any of the Decca mastering engineers.

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What Can You Learn from a Mercury Shootout Like This One?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Recordings Available Now

The short answer is that you can’t learn much from this shootout, because we’re not telling you which title the stampers you see below belong to.

Be that as it may, in the case of this mystery title the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct — the earlier numbered pressings did better than the later numbered pressings, and the early labels did better than the later labels.

That happens a lot, and we are happy to admit that it does. Why? Because the experimental evidence — the data — say that is what happened.

As usual for posts in which the stamper sheet from a shootout is reproduced in its entirety, the stamper numbers shown below will belong to a different album than the one you see pictured.

These can be found under the heading of Mystery Stampers. Most of these posts will illustrate something to be learned from a Hot Stamper shootout, but because the information reveals the shootout winning stampers, the actual title of the record is rarely revealed.

Much more useful stamper information can be found using this link, which includes plenty of stamper numbers for specific titles that are best avoided by audiophiles looking for top quality sound. In addition, we post the winning and losing stampers for some titles that are an unreliable guide to good sound. Unreliable stampers are also quite common.

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RE-2 Wins Our Shootouts for this Jimmy Smith Recording

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

What happens when all the stampers are RE-2?

This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the Jimmy Smith Verve album you see pictured to the left and whose stamper sheet is shown below.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings? The stamper numbers are no help.  There were some markings in the dead wax for the 3+ copies that were different from the copies that earned lower grades, but they are hard to read and most sellers we buy from would struggle to identify them.

No, on this record there was really nothing to go by other than the sound.

From our shootout panel’s point of view, this is the only way it can possibly work.

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Here Are the Shootout Winning Stampers for SR 90435

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Living Presence Records Available Now

You may have noticed that when we give out the stampers for the top copies, we rarely identify the title of the record with those Shootout Winning stampers.

As you can well imagine, our sizable investments in research and development over the course of decades make up a big part of the costs we must pass on to our customers.

However, in the case of Mercury SR 90435, knowing the Shootout Winning stamper numbers is not going to get you very far (which is of course the only reason we can afford to give out this information).

You will actually need a pile of copies with those stampers in order to find one worthy of a 3+ White Hot stamper grade.

Obviously, knowing the “right” stamper information in this case gets you in the ballpark, but it won’t help you hit the grand slam home run you were hoping for. To do that you have to clean and play at least five copies the way we did.

Hot Stamper shootouts may be expensive, they may be a lot of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to find the highest quality pressings. They’re the ones that earn the 3+ grades, not the 1.5+ grades, regardless of their stamper numbers, labels, mastering engineer credits or country of origin.

As we have been saying for more than twenty years, for title after title, when you clean them right and play them right, they might all look the same, but rarely if ever will they sound the same.

Changes for 2024

Beginning in 2024 we decided to make available to our readers a great deal of the pressing information we’ve compiled over the last twenty years, under these headings:

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Does 1s Sound Great or Does It Sound Good (but Hot, Dry and Crude)?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

Below you will see the complete stamper sheet for a shootout we did recently.

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely if ever give out the specific information that identifies the best sounding pressing of any album.

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own! We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but naturally we find it necessary to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” is where we choose to draw it.

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When All the Stampers Are the Same, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

What happens when all the stampers are A and B and every one of them is cut by Rudy Van Gelder?

This is precisely the problem we were faced with on the mystery Blue Note album whose stampers can be seen below.

It’s not Cornbread — those are really hard to find! We did a shootout last year and hope to have another one coming before long, but most of what we buy ends up going back to the seller for noise issues, so it may be a while before we can get it going.

In the meantime, whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Tone Poets reissue — it’s ridiculously bad.

What information can you rely on when trying to find the best sounding pressings?

The stamper numbers are no help.

And you can’t look for the VAN GELDER stamp in the deadwax since they all have it.

Of course, now that we’ve done the shootout, we know to buy the Liberty label pressings, but that could hardly have been predicted beforehand. Plenty of later labels beat the early label pressings on Blue Note’s albums.

But readers of this blog surely know that we are being facetious when we say we faced a lack of stamper information with the title above.

We have no way of knowing what the label is for any copy that is playing on our turntable, so how could the stamper information possibly matter, ever, under any circumstances?

We judge records by their sound quality, then grade them on that single metric, ignoring all others.

Only later do we learn which labels and stamper numbers correspond with which sonic grades, assuming they actually correspond at all. (Some don’t.)

If you are buying certain pressings because they have earlier labels, rather than pressings with later labels, predicated on the theory that the earlier labels should have better sound, this blog will be a godsend — because it will prove to you that the approach you are taking is not a particularly good one.

You are only fooling yourself if you think it is. It might work more often than not, but do you really want to be wrong about four records out of ten? Forty out of a hundred. Four hundred out of a thousand? With no way of knowing which group — good or bad — any given title happens to fall into?

A record collection of a thousand records is a decent sized collection. But with four hundred titles having second-rate or worse sound? Nobody wants that.

Buying originals is just not a good way to insure your collection will have top quality sound. Fortunately we know of a way that does.

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