Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now
Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
If you are new to the audio game, and even if you aren’t, we think you will find much of value there. (If you already think you know it all, his blog will be of little use, but of course neither will mine. You already know it all!)
This link will take you to a comparison Robert Brook carried out between some copies of Abraxas: his own and a Hot Stamper pressing he borrowed from a friend.
I wrote to him about a few issues I had with his commentary.
Dear Robert,
Of course we love it when one of our records gives you the experience you had.
But there are some fine points we must keep in mind, so that our approach is presented as correctly as possible, with nothing that could be construed as hype or misinformation.
To start with, I would not say you can’t hack a hot stamper.
I would say it is very hard.
You could say something like: “Tom says his superior cleaning techniques make it hard to compete with him. If you have a copy with the same stampers as his, his will sound better most of the time simply because the right cleaning noticeably improves the sound’
Which means that you need a different stamper to beat mine. You need the stamper of the record that won our shootout, not the one that came in at 2+!
Anyone can do it is our motto.
It’s hard is also our motto. (We have a lot of mottos.)
We only beat your other copies on one side, so imagine if the copy you heard did not have that one great side? That is something to think about!