sheet

These listings have portions of our notes reproduced for those who want to learn more about stamper numbers and pressings variations.

Scooped and Weird – Can That Really Be the Right Sound for Neil’s Debut?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Many years ago we thought the early pressings of Neil Young’s first album, the ones using the original mix, had the best sound.

We realized — eventually — that we were way off the mark about that and took the time to write a couple of commentaries about that awful mix, explaining just how wrong we were.

However, the right mix only gets you so far. There are dozens of different pressings of this album, and most of them are not very good sounding. In our Hot Stamper listings we note as much:

The sound of the typical pressing leaves a lot to be desired. You get copies where Neil’s voice is so forward that it quickly becomes fatiguing and unpleasant. Many later pressings are just the opposite — Neil’s voice is so muffled he’s practically underwater, probably because those pressings are made from copy tapes of compromised fidelity.

It’s the rare copy that puts him in the right place, and even then there are still plenty of ways in which a copy can fall well short of the best.

We played a copy from the shootout pressed on the later tan label that turned out to be a real mess. Nothing else in our shootout sounded quite like it, and that’s a good thing.

It was just bizarre:

  • Scooped and weird
  • No upper mids but scratchy highs

Can you imagine playing a copy this wrong and thinking you were hearing the sound that Neil had recorded? That was Reprise in the mid-seventies — they could not have cared less what the old titles they were stamping out sounded like. Why should they? There wasn’t any money in it and customers didn’t seem to mind.

If it’s all about the music, as some mistaken audiophiles will tell you to this day, what on earth does sound quality have to do with it anyway? (Keep in mind this was long before the advent of the CD. If you wanted to buy a new copy of the album, it was a crappy reissue LP or a cassette. Your poison awaits.)

And it gets worse. Practically every reissue produced after 1975 was every bit as bad. Here’s a typical Winchester pressing that somehow made it into the shootout, probably as a matter of curiosity:

It would be hard to judge which of these two awful pressings had the worst sound. I suppose with the right tone controls, assuming your premap has such things, you could try to fix the WW pressing. The earlier pressing strikes me as a lost cause. (To get a better feel for what we mean by scooped-out mids, here’s a good example, a record that some audiophiles actually have in their collections, hard as that may be to believe.)

It took us a long time to figure out which pressings had the right sound for this music. If you want to go down that lonesome road, the one thing I can tell you is that you definitely have your work cut out for you. Good luck though. If you stick with it, you will surely learn a lot, even if you end up with a pressing that doesn’t sound remotely as good as the ones we sell.

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And Here I Thought the Porky/Pecko Pressings Would All Sound Awesome

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This is a highly unusual post for us here at Better Records, the first of its kind. We just did a shootout for Solomon’s Seal last week and here we are practically the very next day giving out the Shootout Winning stampers on the blog, and for free no less.

As you might have expected, we have a self-serving reason for revealing this information, and it should become obvious to you what that reason is by simply checking out the stamper sheet from the shootout shown below.

We often get requests from our readers to give out the “right” stampers, the “best” stampers, the stampers they should “look for.”

Well, readers, here you go. Have at ’em. Everything you need to know is right there on the sheet: the stampers, the grades, the engineer’s marks, even the grades for the not-recommended domestic pressings.

All the UK stampers are A4/B4 with PORKY/PECKO in the dead wax. (The early domestic pressings are decent, but they cannot begin to compete with the Brits for sound quality. You can safely avoid them unless you are on a strict budget and do not own very high quality equipment, or don’t care much for The Pentangle.)

As you can see from the grades, the best copy was killer, but a copy with the same stampers had sound that would not even qualify as a minimally Hot Stamper pressing. That’s quite a range, but it’s a range that we come across more often than many audiophiles might think would be the case.

If you have only one copy of the original British LP, where do you think yours would rank in terms of sound quality? Is it 3+, or 1+, or perhaps something in between?

(Chances are good it is something in between. Where in between, who can possibly say? That’s a question only a shootout can answer.)

And make special note of the fact the only one copy had even one Triple Plus Shootout Winning side. What would have happened if that one copy had not been part of the shootout?

Oh, this whole shootout business seems to be getting much too complicated much too quickly. Let’s just do what audiophiles have been doing for decades and ignore all these complications. Let’s pretend that the original Reprise British pressings with PORKY/PECKO stampers sound great and leave it at that. Anything else is just too much trouble, don’t you think?

It turns out that knowing the best stampers for Solomon’s Seal is no help at all. The best stampers and the worst stampers are the same stampers!

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Before and After Science – Rules Are Made to Be Broken

Hot Stamper Pressings of Art Rock Recordings Available Now

The domestic pressings of Before And After Science are typically grainy, low-rez and hard sounding. But that doesn’t mean our best Hot Stamper pressings are imports.

No. The best pressings are made right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Say what? Yes, it’s true. We were SHOCKED to find such Hot Stamper sound lurking in the grooves of a domestic Eno LP. It’s the only one of its kind. In thirty plus years of record playing I can’t think of any domestic Eno LP that ever sounded this good.

Now hold on just a minute. The British pressings of Eno’s albums are always the best, aren’t they?

For the first three albums, absolutely. But rules were made to be broken. This pressing has the knockout sound we associate with the best British originals of Eno’s albums, not the flat, cardboardy qualities of the typical domestic reissue.

The UK pressings we have played have always been awful. We put one in a shootout in 2025 and it was as awful as we remember it. Our notes read:

  • Very lean and dry.
  • Zero bass!
  • Lousy!

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And Here I Thought The Mastering Lab Made Nothing But Good Sounding Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:

Analog at its Tubey Magical finest. You’ll never play a CD (or other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long you live.  This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.

But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.

One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.

The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.

Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*

Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)

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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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Strawberry Studios Dropped the Ball When They Mastered This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis Costello’s Albums Available Now

We described a Shootout Winning Hot Stamper pressing of Armed Forces we listed not long ago this way:

This vintage UK pressing will show you just how good sounding Elvis’s best recording can be, with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one.

It’s some of the biggest, boldest rock sound ever recorded. A Top 100 Demo Disc – every track is Elvis at his best.

Armed Forces is one of the best-sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this is proof enough to back up that claim. The better copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

I would say the sound of the rhythm section of this album ranks up there with the very best ever recorded. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the very best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

All true, if you happen to be playing the right UK pressing. The ones with Strawberry in the dead wax on side one, however, are not remotely competitive with the best pressings we played in our last shootout, as you can easily see from the stamper sheet below.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Armed Forces can be on the best vintage pressings.

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A Deep, Deep Dive into LSC 2323 – A Shootout Like No Other

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

Years ago, around 2005 if memory serves, I played a copy of the Classic Records remastered pressing of LSC 2323 and thought it was pretty good.

It seemed better than the Shaded Dog copies I had compared it to, which, based on the hundreds of other Classic Records titles I had auditioned up to then, was unexpected to say the least.

Unheard of is more like it. (That is no longer true — stay tuned for the story of the one Classic Records classical record that actually won a shootout not that long ago.)

Little did I know that the Shaded Dog pressings on this title are not remotely competitive with the right early reissues.

The best of the Shaded Dog pressings we could find, which just happened to have a 1s side one, came in tied for last with the one 70s Red Seal pressing we thought sounded good enough to make the shootout. (Most are terrible.)[1][2]

Some Inside Baseball

Most of the Shaded Dogs and Red Seals were needle-dropped, and all but two were eliminated before the shootout. It takes time and wastes money to clean and play pressings that sound hopeless, so a quick elimination round often precedes the cleaning process.

Back then it was tough to wrap my head around the idea that a Classic Record classical title could actually be better sounding than a Shaded Dog — it had never happened, so I knew there had to be more to the story.

The time to do a serious investigation of LSC 2323 necessary to get to the bottom of what was truly a head scratcher was not in the cards, so I shelved the project for close to the next twenty years. (Other such oddities have their own section here by the way.)

This title would have to wait until 2025 to go through a proper shooout, and when it did, naturally the Classic was part of the mix, which is the way we do things here at Better Records.

Why? Because every record with any hope of sounding good must be given the chance to show us what it can do. It deserves to be evaluated fairly, without the listener having any knowledge as to which pressing my be playing.

It turns out that side one of the Classic was passable, but side two — the side I had never played — was every bit as bad as most of their other classical offerings, which is very bad indeed.

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Isn’t This Supposed to Be a Good Sounding Sonny Rollins Record?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

It is — or can be — but that’s only possible — as far as we know — on the early stereo pressings. On the mono pressings, the ones originally pressed in 1965 on the black dynagroove label, and never pressed again, not so much. They’re not awful, but they’re not very good either.

Which means that as a general rule, audiophiles should stick to the stereo pressings of this album, in the same way that they should almost always stick to stereo pressings of stereo recordings.

This is a Core Insight we only arrived at after playing hundreds of mono pressings made from tapes originally recorded in stereo. [1] Rarely do the mono pressings of such titles sound remotely as good as the stereo pressings.

Here is how we described a killer stereo copy of The Standard Sonny Rollins we encountered during the course of a shootout in 2025:

The Standard Sonny Rollins is back on the site for only the second time in over four years, here with outstanding sound throughout this original stereo pressing.

Once again the brilliant engineering of Ray Hall for RCA conveys the vitality of live music for these sessions (which were undoubtedly recorded live). Includes superstars like Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, and Bob Cranshaw, who’ve lent their talents to some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

Here is the stamper sheet showing how the mono pressing fared. In the past we’ve had similar luck with the mono pressings of Living Stereo recordings, but this one was cheap and we figured why not?

Collectors often say that the mono pressings of jazz albums are often the best sounding. Well, why not put that proposition to the test? That is after all the business we are in, testing whether something is true or not to the best of our ability.

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For Scottish Fantasy, Forget the Red Seal Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings Featuring the Violin Available Now

The 70s Red Seal pressings we’ve played recently have all left a lot to be desired, but, since we had one sitting on a shelf in the backroom with lower stampers, we figured what the hell, let’s clean it up, throw it into our next shootout and hope for the best.

As you can see, the best was not to come.

There are quite a number of other records that we’ve run into over the years with obvious shortcomings.

Here are some of them, a very small fraction of what we’ve played, broken down into the three major labels that account for most of the best classical and orchestral titles we’ve had the pleasure to play.

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