shootout-basics

For a More Scientific Approach to Finding Better Records, Sweat the Details

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

More Commentaries on the Basics of Shootouts

When it comes to doing shootouts, half the battle is just being able to play the record right.

Our approach is simply a matter of precisely adjusting the arm and cartridge for every title, then comparing the various pressings, properly cleaned of course, under carefully controlled conditions, with as much scientific rigor as we can bring to the proceedings.

In some ways it is analogous to rocket science, which we would define as the seemingly simple process of discovering all the details that need to be sweated and then sweating the hell out of them.

It’s the opposite of theoretical physics. One doesn’t need to be a novel thinker or have big ideas to do audio well.

Obsessively working through the basics of table setup, tweaks, room treatments and electrical quality will take your system to levels beyond those you could have ever imagined.

And, you sure don’t need a bloody microscope to check your stylus rake angle, unlike some audiophile reviewers who insist that such devices are somehow essential.

Your ears, if they are any good at all, will do the job just fine, and probably much better.

Tuning and Tweaking Are Essential to Improving Your Critical Listening Skills

The Science of Hot Stampers – Incomplete, Imperfect, and (Gulp!) Provisional

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Records – A Step By Step Guide

More Commentaries and Advice on Equipment

How can I find my own Hot Stamper pressings?

More Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can get your hands on.

There are four basic steps you must take, and you have to do right by each of the four if you are going to be successful at discovering and evaluating your own Hot Stampers. 

We discuss every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this blog. Although none of it will come as news to anyone who has spent much time reading our stuff, we cobbled together this commentary to help formalize the process and hopefully make it easier to understand and follow.

If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly and carefully and above all scientifically than most audiophiles and record collectors we’ve met apparently think is necessary. Don’t be one of those guys. Do it right and get the results that are simply not possible with any other approach.

The Four Cornerstones of Hot Stamper Shootouts

The work of finding these very special pressings is made up of these four parts.

  1. You must have a sufficient number of copies to play in order to find at least one “hot” one.
  2. You must be able to clean your copies properly in order to get them to sound their best.
  3. You must be able to reproduce your copies faithfully.
  4. You must be able to evaluate them critically.

There is a clear benefit to doing it this way, and it’s something you should consider when tweaking your system too.

Lately we have achieved the best results by going about it like this:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John beats the hell out of on Norwegian Wood just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.

This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it, especially if you use our approach.

It works for us and there’s no reason it can’t work for you.

Some Listening Basics

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Learning the Record, Any Record

More of the Music of the Traveling Wilburys

More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Many of the pressings we played of Volume One suffered from too much compression and a phony hi-fi-ish quality on the vocals. We knew there had to be better sounding copies out there somewhere, so we kept dropping the needle on every pressing we could get our hands on until we found one. Here is how we described a killer copy we ran into during that process.

We heard a lot of copies with a spitty, gritty top end, but this one is smooth like butter.

Side two is nearly as good but doesn’t have quiet the same energy factor. It’s still dramatically better than most copies out there.

Now that we’ve discovered these Hot Stampers, the sound is finally where we want it to be. Until this week, we were convinced that these songs sounded better on the radio. (That’s what tons of compression and FM bass boost will do for you.)

Learning the Record

For our recent shootout we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought would have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that other pressings do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given copy reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we never pretended it was. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection.

The problem is that unless your a crazy person who bought multiple copies of the same album, there is no way to know if any given copy is truly Hot Stamper. Hot Stampers are not merely good sounding records. They are the copies that did well in shootouts. This is a fact that cannot be emphasized too strongly.

As your stereo and room improve, as you take advantage of new cleaning technologies, as you find new and interesting pressings to evaluate, you may even be inclined to start the shootout process all over again, to find the hidden gem, the killer copy that blows away what you thought was the best.

You can’t find it by looking at it. You have to clean it and play it, and always against other pressings of the same album. There is no other way.

For the more popular records on the site such as the Beatles titles, we have easily done more than twenty, maybe even as many as thirty to forty shootouts. 

And very likely learned something new from every one.

New to the Blog? Start Here

What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on a Given Album?

Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts

Hot Stampers – The Four Pillars of Success

Doing carefully controlled shootouts with large groups of records is the only practical way anyone can teach themselves what to listen for.

The advice you see below is often reproduced on our site. Here is some we recently included in a listing for Rubber Soul, with specific commentary about the song Norwegian Wood:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John strums the hell out of on Norwegian Wood from Rubber Soul just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough.

    1. First you go deep into the sound.
    2. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies.
    3. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.

Once you have done that work, when it comes time to play a modern record, on any label, it often becomes obvious what they “did to it” in the mastering, and how far short if falls when compared head to head to the pressings that were found to have the best sound. 

Our critiques are often quite specific about the sound of these Heavy Vinyl pressings. Our review for the remastered Rubber Soul is a good example of how thorough we can be when we feel the need to get down to brass tacks. 

Many of those who were skeptical before they heard their first Hot Stamper have written us letters extolling the virtues of our pressings. Here are some Testimonial Letters you may find of interest.

One Final Note

Before you try your first Hot Stamper, as long as you are buying vintage pressings in the meantime, not audiophile records, you are probably not wasting much money.

Every vintage pressing has the potential to teach you something.

A modern record, on the other hand, should never be considered anything more than a stop-gap, a kind of sonic benchmark to beat when you finally find a better sounding vintage pressing in acceptable condition.

New to the Blog? Start Here

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

Beware of Fooling Yourself with Pseudo Shootouts

Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments 

How Can I Recognize What I Should Be Listening For on a Given Album?

We encourage any audiophile who wants to improve the quality of his record collection to start doing his own shootouts. Freeing up an afternoon to sit down with a pile of cleaned copies of a favorite LP (you won’t make it through any other kind) and playing them one after another is by far the best way to learn about records and their manifold pressing variations.

Doing your own shootout will also help you see just how much work it is.

Be sure to take extensive notes.

Shootouts are a great deal of work if you do them right. If you have just a few pressings on hand and don’t bother to clean them carefully, or follow rigorous testing protocols, that kind of shootout anyone can do. We would not consider that a real shootout. (Art Dudley illustrates this approach, but you could pick any reviewer you like — none of them have ever undertaken a shootout worthy of the name to our knowledge.)

With only a few records to play – a woefully inadequate sample size — you probably won’t learn much of value and, worse, you are unlikely to find a top copy, although you may be tempted to convince yourself that you have.

As Richard Feynman famously remarked, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” (more…)

What We Listen For – The Basics

What Makes This Enya Pressing a Hot Stamper?

More Advice on How to Find Your Own Hot Stampers

Specifically, what are the criteria by which a record like this should be judged?

Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings:

  • energy,
  • vocal presence,
  • frequency extension (on both ends),
  • transparency,
  • harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key),
  • rhythmic drive,
  • tonal correctness,
  • fullness,
  • size,
  • space,
  • Tubey Magic,

and on down through the list.

When we can get all, or almost all, of the qualities above to come together on any given side, we provisionally award it a grade of “contender.”

Once we’ve been through all our copies on one side, we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side.

Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides matched up.

It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself. We guarantee you have never heard this music — really, any music — sound better than it does on one of our Hot Stamper pressings, or your money back.

Here are some records that are good for testing the qualities we look for in our shootouts:

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Hot Stamper Note Taking – Here Is What You Need to Know

Basic Concepts and Realities Explained 

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can lay your hands on.

Lately we have achieved better results by going about it like this:

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album at key moments of your choosing.

Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that others do not do as well, using a specific passage of music — the acoustic guitar John beats the hell out of on Norwegian Wood[1] just to take one example — it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces that passage.

The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

Admittedly, to clean and play enough copies to get to that point may take all day, but you will have gained experience and knowledge that you cannot come by any other way. If you do it right and do it enough it has the power to change everything you will ever achieve in audio.

The kind of notes I take can be seen below. 4×6 Post-its work great for this purpose, using one per side. We go through thousands of them every year. Without specific notes on your records about exactly what you heard as you played them, you cannot possibly keep track of which pressings have the qualities you were listening for, and in what amounts.  Extensive notes like the ones you see below are a must.

Below you will find more readable copies of the notes. Other reviews with post-its can be found here.

[1] Norwegian Wood from our Listening in Depth Commentary

Those close-miked guitars can be a bit much unless you have a super-low-distortion copy.

John strums the hell out of his acoustic in the right channel, and on the best copies the sound of the guitar is very dynamic and energetic. No two copies will get that guitar to sound the same, and the more dynamic and lively it sounds, the better in my book.

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How Much Better Sounding Is a Stradavarius?

A Primer on How to Get to the Truth (Which Works for Records Too)

A skeptical take on an old claim, using the Gold Standard of Double Blind Testing.

We evaluate records using something like double blind testing in the record shootouts we do five days a week. It’s what makes us unique in the world of record dealers and collectors. We allow the records to speak for themselves.

With the evaluation process we use, there can be no influence or bias from the reviewer’s preconceived notion of what pressing should sound best, because the person sitting in the listening chair does not have any way to know which pressing is actually playing.

This is not quite true for audiophile pressings, since the VTA must be adjusted for their thicker vinyl. The way such evaluations are done is simple enough however. We play a top quality Hot Stamper pressing, typically one that received a grade of White Hot (A+++), check the notes for what the test tracks are and what to listen for, and then proceed to test the Heavy Vinyl pressing on those same tracks, listening for those same qualities.

It rarely takes more than a few minutes to recognize the faults of the average audiophile pressing.

When played head to head against an exceptional vintage LP, the audiophile pressing’s shortcomings become all too obvious. Again and again, the audiophile pretender is found to be at best a second- or  third-rate imitation of the real thing, if not downright awful.

How the sound of the modern remastered mediocrity has managed to impress so many self-identified audiophiles is shocking to those of us who have been working to get the best sound from our records for a very long time, developing both our systems and our critical listening skills over the decades.

In defense of these surprisingly easily-impressed audiophiles, I should point out that even we were fooled twenty years ago by many of the Heavy Vinyl records produced around that time, such as those on the DCC label and some by Speakers Corner, Cisco and others. It took twenty years to get to where we are now, taking advantage of much better equipment, better cleaning technologies, better room treatments, and the like, most of which did not even exist in 2000.

A turning point came in 2007 with the Rhino pressing of Blue, a record that made us ask, “Why are we selling records that we would not want to own or listen to ourselves?”

In closing, there is one fact that cannot be stressed enough, which may seem like a tautology but is nevertheless axiomatic for us:

Doing record shootouts, more than anything else, has allowed us to raise our critical listening skills to the level needed to do proper shootouts. It’s how we became expert listeners.

Without that process, one which we painstakingly developed over the course of the last twenty-five years, we could not possibly do the work we have set out for ourselves: to find the best sounding pressings of the most important music ever pressed on vinyl.

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