hoffman

Hot Stampers May or May Not Cause Cognitive Dissonance

Acquiring Better Sounding Records – Hot Stampers Versus Collectible Vinyl

Hot Stampers don’t always cause cognitive dissonance because some people never developed much in the way of critical listening skills. There are also other reasons, some of which we discuss below.

Without knowing what to listen for on a record, what are you left with? What aural information can you rely on?  None it seems.

If that is the case, all you can really go by are what your heroes — the mastering engineers who make audiophile recors — tell you. And these days you have so many great ones to choose from!

In the letter below I discuss with my good customer Aaron how to help his friend Jack come to a better understanding of the differences between various pressings of records, vintage LPs like the ones we sell, and the ones that have been remastered on Heavy Vinyl, like the one he already owns.

Head to head comparisons are the best way — practically the only way — to determine what a particular LP sounds like relative to another pressing. Basically, we want to know what the various strengths and weaknesses are for each of the pressings we are playing against each other.

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Latin ala Lee! The Record of the Year for 2003?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miss Peggy Lee Available Now

UPDATE 2026

It’s highly unlikely we would still agree with all the good things we had to say back in 2003 about Latin ala Lee! on Heavy Vinyl, but here it is anyway.

Plenty of records that sounded good to me back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore, for the simple reason that, in this case, since 2003 we’ve managed to make a huge number of changes to the system.

These changes resulted in more accurate and revealing playback, derived mostly from the testing we did with this group of records and others like them. (Here is a personal favorite.)

Unfortunately for all concerned, S&P’s releases from this era (as well as DCC’s) had to fight their way through Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system, a subject we discuss in more depth here.

As for the difficult remix, the more remixes I hear, the less I like them. The ones Hoffmann did for Nat King Cole (see here) drive me up a wall.

Our Old Review

The Record of the Year for 2003.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s true! If you don’t have a smile on your face fifteen seconds after playing track one, you better check your pulse, cuz, as the famous song has it: Jack, You Dead. Amazingly good sound, courtesy of a fabulous and painstakingly difficult remix by the mastering guru himself, Steve Hoffman. This is popular music for the previous generation — but why should we be denied these long forgotten treasures?

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Pet Sounds on DCC Is Yet Another Mediocre Remaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.

It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?

You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

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We Get Letters – “That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

A customer wrote the following to us not long ago:

Recently I fired up my CD circuit, which does not happen very often.

Once the system was warmed up I played some MoFi gold CDs.

Nothing special, but I did like the Yes Fragile CD. Actually enjoyed it.

Guns and Roses Appetite was nasty…

Supertramp Breakfast was nasty…

Enough of that. Then I read your blog on the Doors LA Woman DCC gold CD. Found I have it!

Played the whole thing and I wanted more of it. That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.

Dear Sir,

Steve did a great job on L.A. Woman, let me be the first to say. Of course the real thing on vinyl is even better, but it’s a great way to test how good your front end is, assuming you have a killer copy of the vinyl, something that is very unlikely to be the case but something that cannot be ruled out entirely. (Tell me your stamper numbers and I will tell you if you are close.)

I worked through a lot of changes to my system in the 90s and 2000s partly because I had CDs that sounded better in some ways than my vinyl versions of them.

That never happens now, but it took me 20 years to get there!

For example, in the early 2000s this title did not sound as good as the CD until I got rid of all my tube equipment and discovered the life-changing sound of the EAR 324P, the Dynavector 17d and a lot more. The transient attack of the drums and cymbals went from “well recorded — it’s a direct to disc, what did you expect?” to suddenly sounding like real drums you might hear if you were sitting right in front of the kit in a small club.

(I recently took a trip to Nashville and had a chance to see and hear more than a dozen drum kits on the main boulevard. There seemed to be one in every club, facing inwards with the glass of the window removed to give the passers by a taste of what was in store for them inside. Standing three feet from a guy banging a drum kit is something that can teach you a lot about sound, mostly by showing you the enormous gulf that separates live sound from recorded sound in the most audiophile systems.)

That CD of The Three showed me what I had been missing — the presence, dynamics, and most importantly speed and complete freedom from smear of any kind on any instrument. It changed many of my ideas about audio in the most fundamental ways imaginable. Nothing in my audio world was the same after that.

Of the many audio breakthroughs I’ve undergone in the fifty years I’ve been pursuing audio , I might be inclined to put this one right at the top of the list.

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How Paul and Judy Finally Turned Me Against DCC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

When I finally got around to comparing the two, I remember being taken aback by how much better my original Artisan pressing sounded than the supposedly superior DCC, the one pressed at high quality Heavy Vinyl at RTI to the most exacting standards possible, yada, yada, yada.

What finally turned me completely against DCC were the awful Paul Simon solo albums they remastered.  Two were released, two I had as unreleased test pressings, and all of them were clearly and markedly inferior to the good original pressings I had owned.

So much for believing in DCC.

Since that time we have learned that placing your faith in any record label or cutting operation is a mistake.

You have to play the records to know how they sound.

Nothing else works, and nothing else can work.

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Good Digital Beats Bad Analog Any Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

And this is some very bad analog indeed!

We here present our 2010 review of the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 album, the one remastered on two slabs of 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl.

It has everything going for it, right?

Steve Hoffman, Kevin Gray, 45 RPMs, Heavy Virgin Vinyl, fancy packaging — clearly no expense was spared!

The ingredients may have been there, but the cake they baked was not only not delicious, it was positively unlistenable — I mean, inedible.

I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding “audiophile” pressing than this Rollins record, and believe me, I’ve heard plenty. (And it seems the bad news will never stop.)

As I noted in another commentary “Today’s audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making as a budding enthusiast more than thirty forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed limited edition — aren’t these all just the latest audiophile fads, each with a track record more dismal than the last one?”

It reminds me of the turgid muck that Doug Sax was cutting for Analogue Productions back in the 90s. The CD has to sound better than this. There’s no way could it sound worse.

CD Update:

I managed to track down a copy of the CD and it DOES sound better than this awful record, and by a long shot. It’s not a great sounding CD, but it sure isn’t the disaster this record is.

Buy the CD, and whatever you do, don’t waste money on this kind of crap vinyl.

This is a very bad sounding record, so bad that one minute’s play will have you up and out of your chair trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with your system. But don’t bother. It’s not your stereo, it’s this record.

It has the power to make your perfectly enjoyable speakers sound like someone wrapped them in four inches of cotton bunting while you weren’t looking.

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West Side Story – How Does the DCC Pressing Stack Up?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

I’ve known this was a well recorded album since I first heard the excellent DCC Gold CD back in the 90s.

If you happen to own the DCC vinyl, buy the CD and find out for yourself if it doesn’t have better sound.

The vinyl will most likely be thick, opaque, airless and tonally too smooth.

That is the sound their records tended to have back in those days, and at the time I bought into that mastering approach.

Over the course of the next decade I learned how foolish I had been to fall for that kind of euphonic EQ.

The better the system, the more second-rate Hoffman’s remastered vinyl releases will sound when they aren’t just terrible.

And Kevin Gray, his partner in crime, has been making a mockery of the audiophile LP for decades now.

Testing with Oscar

We write quite a bit about how good pianos are for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

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Letter of the Week – “I still find the WHS to Hoffman 45 comparison a particularly insightful one.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Our good customer Aaron is somewhat obsessed with the White Hot Stamper Rumours he bought from us a while back. He finds testing it against the Hoffman 45 RPM version of the album his audiophile friends own instructive, about their systems, what they listen for, and lots more.

I’ve added some comments which I hope are helpful as well. We’ll let him take it from here.

Dear Tom,

I still find the WHS to Hoffman 45 comparison a particularly insightful one. I remember the bass being bloated and wonky on the Hoffman, and tight and impactful on the WHS on my system. I found it that way on [my friend’s] system too, but sometimes live rock music has unpleasant, over-emphasized bass. The kids like it that way I guess.

Aaron,

The proper comparison is not live rock music because a studio album is not really trying to recreate the sound of the band in concert.

On the best pressings the sound should be tonally balanced and correct, with no faults of any kind to draw your attention.

A Super Hot could sound that way. The White Hot would be 25% bigger and clearer and more punchy and resolving while still being balanced and tonally neutral.

Having auditioned and tested them by the hundreds, it has been our experience that Heavy Vinyl records never come to life the way the best vintage pressings do.

You need the right system to hear the difference, and the more right the system, the more you will hear how big the difference is.

I didn’t make any particular note of the position of the vocals, but one thing [my friend’s] system does really well is imaging, so I’m inclined to trust his impression from where he was sitting. It might be that what he was experiencing as accurate, breathtaking sound was described as “forward.” Seems like a reasonable term for that experience.

That could be a bad wire, bad electricity, glare from hi-fi-ish electronics, bad room treatments or no room treatments at all, bad speaker positioning — lots of things make vocals more forward in either a good way or a bad way. This story might be helpful in understanding some aspects of midrange presentation we wrestled with when setting up our new studio.

From where I sat, I could agree with [my friend] that the Hoffman put the snare more forward than the WHS does, but whether you like that or find it a distraction is a matter of taste.

Which is why this is not a good test record.

Where is the snare supposed to be? Who can say?

Good test records are the ones where the sound is clearly more wrong or more right as something in the playback changes, whether it’s a new piece of equipment, a tweak, or a different pressing of the same music.

If the snare is forward on a system, you play an orchestral record and point to the fact that the violins are hard and the brass is honky, or the piano sounds clanky or vague, and then you know you need to fix something because none of those instruments are supposed to sound that way.

But a snare on a rock record?

You didn’t mix the album. You don’t know! Worse, you can’t know.

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Letter of the Week – “Tom likes forward-sounding records, mastered for FM broadcasts. Steve masters for home stereos.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

One of our good customers played some Hot Stamper pressings for a friend of his and wrote to tell us about  the experience.

Dear Tom,

There’s some fascinating sociology here with how contentious your business model is. It really tweaks people.

I recently made a friend who’s always been a vinyl enthusiast. He’s got a fantastic collection. My friend has worked with Steve Hoffman on a few projects in the past, and holds him in very high regard, both professionally and personally.

We got together over Thanksgiving and I brought along my hot stampers. We listened to them on his gorgeous Linn stereo. One by one, he could appreciate the differences in them, and confirm what I was hearing.

I put my Rumours hot stamper and then his Steve Hoffman remaster. I put my Mahavishnu alongside his first UK pressing. I played my Abraxas Hot Stamper against the MoFi OneStep, which he had heard of, but never actually heard.

We debated the sonic merits of each, noting the different decisions that different mastering engineers had made. In all cases, he heard what there was to like about the hot stampers. Despite the evident sonic differences, which we could both hear and agree to, we disagreed over whether that meant Better Records was really on to something.

My friend’s reasons to resist becoming a customer really had nothing to do with the listening experience we had just shared. “Tom likes forward-sounding records, mastered for FM broadcasts. Steve masters for home stereos.”

Or, “a 1A-1A pressing that’s been well cared for will sound the best by definition because that’s closest to what the artists intended.”

Or, “Tom says there’s variance from one biscuit to the next. That’s clearly absurd.”

All this, despite having heard the records! Now, to my friend’s credit, he did allow that he might have a look at the site and try one out, if a record he really loves pops up at a reasonable price. (As far as I know, he hasn’t done it yet…)

Anyway, I had to agree with him – your business model makes no sense in light of all our preconceptions about how to find great sounding records.

And, even when you hear hot stampers for yourself, the defensive walls still stay up. It’s possible to deny what you’re hearing.

Aaron

Aaron,

A quick note about 1A/1A. There was a time when we might have had 6-8 original pressings of a title, some 1A’s, some 1B’s etc. I would have loved to have let you borrow them and have your friend spot the 1A pressing, since it’s “the best.”

It is of course impossible to do that, but then you just lose friends when you embarrass them that way, and who cares what somebody else likes or doesn’t like, thinks or doesn’t think about records? I sure never did. The records sound the way they sound. Opinions, as you found out for yourself, have been known to vary.

Hoffman’s fans are true believers. Try blindfolding the guys on his forum and playing them a variety of pressings, of his stuff and others. They would not do a good job of knowing which is which by ear, which are the ones you’re supposed to like and which are the ones that shouldn’t sound good, your friend included.

But most audiophiles will never submit to this test because the rug might be pulled out from under them. That is a risk they cannot take. The only tests they are willing to submit to are the ones where they know what the answers are in advance, and, to make matters worse, the only answers they will accept are the ones guaranteed to corroborate their biases and prejudgments.

When Geoff Edgers of The Washington Post wanted to test me with a batch of mystery pressings, I said “Bring it on. I do this for a living, and I’ve been at it for twenty years. I know good sound when I hear it.” He went on to play me two of the best sounding Heavy Vinyl pressings I have ever heard (here’s one of them), as well as some of the worst. (Reviews for those are  coming, but there are only so many hours in a day and finding the motivation to critique mediocre Heavy Vinyl pressings is not easy when there are so many great records to write about.)

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These Are the Kinds of Things You Say When You Haven’t Actually Played the Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

From the brain trust at Music Direct.

[Italics added by yours truly.]

Van Morrison’s Moondance is that rare rock album where the band has buffed the arrangements to pure perfection.

And now, you can experience it on the finest-sounding pressing that’s ever been made courtesy of this 180g LP, remastered at Acoustech from the original analog tapes by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman.

Practically every audiophile press outlet in the world has sung its praises. Moondance has never had such power.

The power to make me wonder how anyone in his right mind would release a record that sounds this bad, that power?

Then there’s this guy, 51nocaster:

As for Moondance, the reissue is very good, but I still prefer the original. Steve Hoffman was involved in mastering the Moondance reissue and like some of the DCC reissues, he seems to favor the lower mids over the upper mids.

As a rule that’s true about DCC records, his awful Creedence records being the best examples, but boy, that’s not what I heard on my copy. Just the opposite. Morrison’s voice on the new reissue has no lower mids. It’s all mids and upper mids.

I suspect a download on ITunes would be more tonally correct in the midrange.

In summary, please count us as one of the outlets not singing this record’s praises, which is why you can find it in our audiophile hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made.

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