Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now
A blast from the past, this time from 2006.
I have to admit that I was dead wrong when I said that the best copies of this album were the Brown Label A&M pressings. I see now how I made this error.
We played four pink label copies and our best A&M LP is only better than three of them.
But it sure isn’t better than this one! I’ve heard a good dozen or so Pink Labels and this is the first one that ever blew my mind. I thought I knew this record, but this copy changes everything.
The above statements may have been true for 2006 but they are not true anymore.
The early Island pressings win every shootout and no domestic pressing has in years.
It’s simply the result of better cleaning technologies and better playback, something we refer to often on this blog as the revolutionary changes in audio we’ve partaken of over the last twenty or so years.
Our White Hot Stamper Commentary from 2006 follows:
This White Hot Pink Label Original British pressing is the ALL TIME CHAMPION Tea For The Tillerman. After a somewhat frustrating daylong search where nearly all of the best sounding copies were also the noisiest, we dropped the needle on this copy, and immediately something became clear. The sound we were hearing on this relatively quiet vinyl was ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.
You may remember one of the comments we made about the Hot Stamper Bookends in which we said we felt as though we had threaded up the master tape and hit play — that’s how unbelievably correct and REAL the sound was. Well, we spoke too soon. THIS record is the record that sounds like you’ve threaded up the master tape. I’ve been playing this album for more than thirty years and I can tell you I have never heard ANYTHING like it.