shootout-advice

Our advice for conducting record shootouts if you want better sounding pressings in a nutshell.

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 the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

It may be a lot of work, but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never contended it was. From the start we’ve explained how to go about finding Hot Stampers for yourself. If you follow our lead, the quality of your collection is almost certain to improve.

An Extraordinary Recording of the Carmen Fantasie – This Is Why You Must Do Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

UPDATE 2025

It has been years since a Whiteback pressing on the later label won a shootout. Some reissue copies of CS 6165 have earned Nearly White Hot Stamper grades, but we would be very surprised if one of the Blueback originals we play in the next shootout does not come out on top. They are just too good.

This London Whiteback LP has DEMO DISC sound like you will not believe, especially on side two, which earned our coveted A Triple Plus rating. The sound is warm, sweet and transparent; in short, absolutely GORGEOUS. We call it AGAIG — As Good As It Gets!

As this is one of the Greatest Violin Showpiece Albums of All Time, it is certainly a record that belongs in every right-thinking audiophle’s collection. (If you’re on our site and taking the time to read this, that probably means you.) Ruggiero Ricci is superb throughout.

And side one was just a step below the second side in terms of sound quality, with very solid A++ sound. To find two sides of this caliber, on quiet vinyl no less, is no mean feat. You could easily go through ten copies without finding one as consistently good sounding as this one.

A True Demo Disc, Or Was It?

Ricci’s playing of the Bizet-Sarasate Carmen Fantasie is OUT OF THIS WORLD. There is no greater perforrmance on record in my opinion, and few works that have as much Audiophile Appeal.

Which is why I’ve had a copy of this record in my own collection for about fifteen years marked “My Demo Disc.” But this copy KILLED it. How could that be?

It just goes to show: No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.

Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of records. That’s why you must do them.

Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us) you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances where you just got lucky. In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.

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How Wide and Tall Is Your Copy of Little Queen? Compared to What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Heart Available Now

Little Queen is yet another recording that only truly comes alive when you turn up your volume.

On the right system, this is a classic rock Demo Disc to beat practically anything you could ever throw at it.

Love Alive and Barracuda on this copy will deliver the full rock and roll power your system is capable of.

If you’ve got The Big Sound, this is the record that will show you just how big it is.

You get huge meaty guitars, big bass, a smooth top end, full-bodied vocals, powerful rock energy and dynamics, loads of richness and incredible transparency.

Wide and Tall

A key quality we look for in Hot Stamper copies of Little Queen is wide and tall presentation.

What exactly does that mean you ask? The best copies, the ones that really jump out of the speakers, tend to present some (usually high frequency) information higher and more forward than others. This is not hard to miss.

When you’re playing ten or fifteen copies of the same side of the same album and suddenly a cymbal crashes higher and more clearly than the others did in the part of the track you are testing, you can’t help but notice it. Wow! How did that get there?

Once you hear it you start to listen for it, and sure enough the next copy won’t do it, nor will the next. Maybe the one after that gets about halfway there: the cymbal crashes are higher than most, but not as high as the one that really showed you how high is up.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Progress in Audio

And of course it all ties in with our revolutionary changes in audio commentary. If you’ve been making steady improvements to your system, or have better cleaning technologies, or better room treatments, or cleaner electricity, maybe ALL the Little Queen pressings do it now. They might ALL do something they never did before, and in fact they SHOULD be doing most things better now. 

Our last shootout was a while back. Since then many, many parts of the chain have undergone improvement. During this shootout we heard things in the recording we’d never heard before. This is the point of all this audio fooling around. It pays off, if you do it right. You have musical information waiting to be unlocked in your favorite recordings. It isn’t going to free itself. You have to do the work to set it free. Do it our way or do it some other way, but do it. You, more than anyone else, will be the one to get the benefit.

Problems Noted More Recently

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The Reissues Consistently Beat the Originals on this Mercury

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Classical Records Available Now

For Mercury classical and orchestral recordings, the original FR pressings on the plum label are the way to go, right? 

In some cases, yes. We talk about how much better the FR pressings for The Firebird are compared to the much more common, and still quite good, M2 reissue pressings here.

The stamper numbers you see below belong to a different album.

The notes for the FR original pressings we played read:

  • Less spacious, more bright and flat.

They’re not bad sounding, they’re just not as good sounding as the RFR reissues, which, incidentally, won the shootout.

We’ve lately been giving out much more stamper information than we used to, but we make it a point to never give out the stamper information for our shootout winners, as finding those very special pressings has been the work of a lifetime and is certainly not something that should be given away for free.

Rules of Thumb

It’s just another one of a number of rules of thumb collectors use (“A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method”), one that will sometimes lead you astray if what you are trying to find are not just good sounding pressings of albums, but the best sounding pressings of albums.

Same with reissue versus original. Nice rule of thumb, but it only works, to the extent that it works at all, if you have enough copies of the title to know that you’re not just assuming the original is better. You actually have the data — gathered from the other LPs you have played — to back it up.

Who Knew?

Who knew the recording would sound so much better on the right reissue pressings?

Certainly not us, not until we had done the shootout.

The difference between the way we do things and the way others do them boils down to this: We assumed that the original could be the best, and then we tested that assumption and found out we were wrong.

But the right reissues of this Mercury — again not the ones you see pictured — is indeed an exceptionally good sounding record.

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, assuming that owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

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The Four Pillars of Success

What Exactly Are Hot Stamper Pressings?

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

There are basically four steps in this process. In order to discover your own Hot Stampers, you must take great pains with all four if you are going to find success in evaluating the pressings you’ve found.

We discuss each and every one of them in scores of commentaries and listings on this very site. Although none of it will come as news to those of you who spend much of their time on this blog, our commentary here is simply lays out the basic formula for the process. 

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 than most audiophiles and record collectors think is necessary.

The Four Cornerstones of Hot Stampers

The work required to find Hot Stamper pressings comprises these four steps.

  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.

How It Used to Be

It’s an open question whether before, say, 2010 we could have done shootouts for many of the albums you’ve seen come to the site since then. Frankly, I have my doubts.

But the good news in audio is that things change. It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad now sound pretty darn good. The site is full of commentaries about them. Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper Revolution is all about.

You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and consider the case closed. You did the right thing, you played by the rules, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, all that kind of stuff. Cross that title off and move on to the next.

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Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part Two

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions about shootouts.

I answered most of them in Part One of this commentary. Here are the questions he posed that remain to be answered.

[I]f you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [the best stampers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

First Question

If I may paraphrase, you’re asking, “do the right stampers always get good grades?”

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Learning the Record, Any Record

More of the Music of the Traveling Wilburys

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.

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A Simple Listening Test Makes It Easy to Judge Pressings of Scheherazade

Hot Stamper Orchestral Pressings Available Now

The Classic reissue of LSC 2446, as well as the Analogue Productions version from 2013 (the original 33 is the only one I have played, mastered by Ryan Smith at Sterling), are, for many reasons, both disasters, but they do have one specific failing that we had no trouble recognizing.

We feel both pressings are worth further discussion and analysis because they both provide an easy test that can show you, dear reader, how wrong they are in one easily identifiable respect.

When reading the commentary below, keep in mind that what is bad about the Classic Records reissue from 1995 is precisely what is bad about the Analogue Productions remaster put out many years later.

As I noted for some of the Classic Heifetz titles a while back, for all I know the CDs for his Living Stereo recordings may have better sound. That’s probably the first place to go, considering Classic’s rather poor track record regarding the remastering of his music.

Case in point: The Living Stereo CDs I own (both the CD and the SACD) of Scheherazade are dramatically better than the awful Classic Records pressing of it.

Audiophiles who don’t notice what is wrong with the Classic pressing need to get hold of a nice RCA White Dog pressing to see just how poorly the Classic stacks up. (They could even find one that’s not so nice and listen through the surface noise. The difference would still be obvious.)

UPDATE 2025

It has been many years since a White Dog pressing won a shootout. In our last listing for a Hot Stamper White Dog pressing in 2024, we noted:

Now that we know which stampers have the potential to win our shootouts, the right Shaded Dog originals have lately been coming out on top, although the White Dog pressings can still sound quite good, just not as good.

No White Dog earned a higher grade than 2+, and none of the three WD pressings we had on hand earned 2+ on both sides.

Our notes for the various sides of the WD pressings read: “a bit brash, sometimes squawky, dry and bright,” and the like.

Those of you looking for the best sound should stick to the Shaded Dog label originals. They are rich and lush in a way that the WD reissues in our experience never are. I used to swear by the WD reissues, but I see now how wrong I was. My judgments were colored by a darker, less revealing stereo than the one we use now, and that makes all the difference in the world.

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The Warm Moods – The Reissue Is So Good, How Can the Original Be Better?

Hot Stamper Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Our review from years ago for the Discovery reissue of The Warm Moods can be found below.

We loved the sound, so much so that we found it hard to fault.

Imagine our surprise when we discoverd that that the original was clearly better.

Much better. At least a full grade better.

When we did the shootout again, a rare (in stereo anyway) original Reprise showed us just how wrong we were.

The best original pressing we found took the sound of The Warm Moods to another level, and a pretty high one at that.

It’s yet another example in which the most important question in all of audio had been overlooked: compared to what?

Who knew the recording could sound any better than the wonderful Discovery pressing we’d played?

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An Extraordinary Recording of the Beethoven Septet – This Is Why You Must Do Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music ofBeethoven Available Now

My first note on side one is “HTF” — Hard To Fault, for the sound was both rich and sweet, with easily recognized, unerringly correct timbres for all seven of the instruments which are heard in the work. The legendary 1959 Decca Tree microphone setup had worked its magic once again.

And, as good as it was, we were surprised to discover that side two was actually even better! The sound was more spacious and more transparent; we asked ourselves, how is this even possible?

Hard to believe but side two had the sound that was TRULY Hard To Fault.

This is precisely what careful shootouts and critical listening are all about.

If you like Heavy Vinyl, what exactly is your frame of reference? How many good early pressings could you possibly own, and how were they cleaned?

Without the best pressings around to compare, Heavy Vinyl can sound fine. It’s only when you have something better that its faults come into focus. (We, of course, have something much, much better, and we like to call them Hot Stampers!)

Side One

A++, so good, yet in comparison to side two we realized that it was not as present, spacious and transparent as it SEEMED.

Side Two

A+++, White Hot!

Ah, here was the sound we didn’t know we were missing. So big and open, with space for every player, each clearly laid out across the stage. This is Hi-Fi at its best.

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