struggle

Not that Long Ago Blue Was a Nut We Just Could Not Crack

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

Allow me to tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

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When We First Started Doing Shootouts, They Would Sometimes Go on for Days

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Our first Hot Stamper listing for After the Gold Rush from back in 2005 talked about what a struggle it was doing them at first.

Back then, with not much in the way of staff, I often had to put the records on the table one at a time and do all the listening and note-taking myself.

For our first Hot Stamper listing I wrote:

A record like this might go through 4 or 5 stages of cleaning and listening and cleaning again. I spent many hours listening to the various copies I played over the course of two days, first one track, then another, this copy, then that one. There’s no other way to do it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no substitute for hard work.

If you can call it that. It ain’t too hard playing a great album over and over again. Some people — myself included — might even call it fun. And now I love this album more than I ever did. I feel like I have come to know it. I’m positively thrilled to finally know how good it really is!

Isn’t that why we audiophiles go through all this shite, as the Brits say? When I hear a piece of familiar music sound better than I ever thought I would hear it, better than I ever imagined it, it’s everything to me. It’s the biggest thrill I know of in audio. It’s what I live for. If you like that feeling, this is the record for you!

I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I find another copy that sounds like this one, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a long time. How many bad domestic rock records did I have to play in order to find a record that sounds like this? A hundred? More?! Who knows? It was a lot, that’s for damn sure.

Speaking of Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

It’s precisely the powerful sound found on this album that rocks our world and makes our job fun. It makes us want to play records all day, sifting through the crap to find the few — too few — pressings with truly serious Hot Stamper sound.

There is, of course, no other way to find such sound, and, of course, probably never will be.

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Listening for a Bit Too Much Tubey Magic Down Low on Buffalo Springfield

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young playing on them are about the best we can do these days. We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this seminal band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites of mine and have been since they were first released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around) Thank god my older stepbrother had good taste in music. I doubt that many 14-year-olds were playing Buffalo Springfield albums, but I was, even though most of the time it was on 8-track tape.

On even the best copies I regret to say there’s a bit too much Tubey Magic in the bass. Tubbiness and bloat were par for the course. This may explain why so many copies have rolled off bass; the engineer cut the bass because he heard how tubby it was and figured no bass is better than bad bass. 

Which is just not true. Cutting the bass leans out and “modernizes” the sound, making the voices sound thinner and dryer. Less rich. This pretty much ruins everything on this album, just the way it ruins everything in many of the modern recordings I hear.

Having your bass under control on the playback side isn’t easy — in fact it’s probably the hardest thing to achieve in audio — but it can be done, and with good bass control the slightly wooly bass is just a part of the sound you learn to accept.

It doesn’t actually interfere much with your enjoyment of the music, mostly because all the other instruments and voices sounds so magical.


The post-it notes you see are very old, probably from the early 2000s.

Until we got our cleaning system sorted in 2007, shootouts for any of this band’s first three albums were going to be tough sledding, if not downright impossible.

In this commentary we describe what needed to change in order to make Buffalo Springfield shootouts a reality.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. This album sounds its best:

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Compromised Recordings Versus Purist Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different then. A few dozen had been done since 2004, and probably not nearly as well as we thought at the time, truth be told.

A while back one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few really amazing sounding direct discs that contains music actually worth listening to. Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. 

Hot Stamper pressings are almost always going to be studio multi-track recordings, not direct to discs of live performances.

They will invariably suffer many compromises compared to the purist approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate sources of distortion in the pursuit of the highest fidelity.

But when they do that, they almost always fail. How many Direct Discs sound like that Glenn Miller? A dozen at most. The vast majority are just plain awful. I know, I’ve played practically every one ever made. For more than a decade I made a living selling them.

Thankfully that is no longer the case, although we do have a handful of direct discs that we still do shootouts for, such as The Three, Glenn Miller, Straight from the Heart and the odd Sheffield.

Compromised Recordings

What we do play is those very special, albeit compromised, mass-produced pressings. The right Londons and Shaded Dogs. Columbia and Contemporary jazz. Brewer and Shipley. Sergio Mendes. The Beatles. The Doobie Brothers for Pete’s sake!

Why? Because those pressings actually communicate the music. They allow you to forget about the recording and just listen. You can’t do that very often with the CD of the album. You can’t even do it with most of the vinyl pressings you run into. You certainly can’t do it with the vast majority of 180 gram LPs being made today, not in our experience anyway.

You have to have the right pressing. That’s what a Hot Stamper is: more than anything else, it’s the right pressing.

It’s the one that really lets the music come through, regardless of whatever compromises were made along the way.

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You Too Can Get an Old Buffalo Springfield Record to Sound This Good

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

This commentary is from 2005 or thereabouts.

Not long ago we found a White Hot Stamper pressing of Last Time Around that really blew our minds. We were surprised to hear some of the breathiest, silkiest vocals we’ve ever heard on ANY Buffalo Springfield album, with startling presence and immediacy to boot! Side two had BY FAR the most energy and life of any side of any copy we’ve ever played. Man, does it ROCK.

Even as recently as 2010 we would not have expected to find that kind of sound on a vintage ’60s pop/rock album. We know better now.

When you get hold of the right copy and know how to clean it and play it right, these vintage pressings (well, the White Hot ones anyway) are a damn sight better than the vast majority of audiophiles think they are. How is such apparently never-before-possible sound being heard now, 45 years after the record came out? Our answer can be found below. 

The kind of MIDRANGE MAGIC found on this pressing let us hear into the music in a way we (and you too I’m guessing) never imagined was possible.

Most copies have no bass, no real top, and are compressed so badly they sound more like cardboard than vinyl. But not this copy — it breaks the mold, revealing to the world (well, our world anyway, the world at Better Records) that those badly recorded Buffalo Springfield records from the ’60s weren’t so badly recorded after all. (more…)

Harvest Was a Struggle in 2008

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Harvest is undeniably one of the most beloved albums in all of classic rock. We get letters all the time from customers hoping to get their hands on Hot Stamper copies, but we’ll never have the supply to keep up with the demand.

It’s a tough nut to crack, because a Hot Stamper Harvest has to get so many things right — the lovely pedal steel guitar on Out On The Weekend, the LSO on A Man Needs A Maid and There’s A World (engineered by Glyn Johns), Neil’s grungy electric guitar on Alabama, and so much more. 

Many copies we played would work for the heavy songs and then fall behind on the softer numbers. Others had gorgeous sound on the country-tinged numbers but couldn’t deliver any whomp for the rockers.

A Copy For The Ages from 2008

Side two of this copy has STUNNINGLY GOOD SOUND! It’s punchy and lively with some of the BIGGEST BASS we’ve ever heard for this album. You won’t believe the WHOMP on this record — just listen to how hard Alabama ROCKS! The overall sound is big, open, and spacious with amazing transparency and lots of extension up top. The vocals are Right On The Money — very present with loads of texture. We rate side two an A+++ — that’s Master Tape Sound, folks, As Good As It Gets!

Drop the needle on Old Man. On virtually every copy we audition the chorus vocals strain to the point of being unpleasant, but here they are smooth and sweet.

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Buffalo Springfield – Finally, a Pressing with Some Highs and Lows

Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young playing on them are about the best we can do these days. We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this seminal band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites and have been since they were released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around).

The following review was written many years ago.

This is the first White Hot Stamper pressing of Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled LP to ever hit the site, and folks, you are in for shock if you know the album well at all. Although for the most part this is no Demo Disc, this pressing is SO MUCH BETTER than any other version we know of that it just blows our minds. I had my mind blown about ten years ago when I found my first one, and nothing has changed. It’s still the best pressing ever.

Side One

A+++, and my notes say that this is the only side one that actually has any frequency extension on either end. For whatever reason, the mastering engineers who cut this first album rarely managed to put any real top or bottom on the record. Why I can’t imagine. Highs and lows are on the tape; this copy proves it.

Again, notes for this side say it’s by far the best, with Tubey Magic, richness, bottom end, presence and freedom from distortion that no other copy could touch. You will not believe it, and the more copies you have tried in the past, the more astonishing the sound of this copy will be to you.

Side Two

A+++, yes, it won both sides in our shootout, and there actually is Demo Disc sound on this side. Track three, Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It, is AMAZING sounding here, probably because the arrangement is so simple that not much studio trickery was needed. (Kind Woman on the third album is that way too — Demonstration Quality on the best pressings.)

So rich and Tubey-Magical, yet clear and very high-rez, this version of the album changes everything. There is simply nothing like it, and when you hear it you will know that that is no hype.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

As of 2025, this record should sound its best this way:

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We Give Up on Chicago III, For Now Anyway

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

Don’t hold your breath for a Hot copy of this album — we just attempted a shootout and came up empty-handed. I doubt we’ll ever find a copy that does what we want it to.

UPDATE 2023

We finally did manage to do a shootout, and this is the copy that ended up on the site on a Hot Stamper pressing. As the response was underwhelming, Chicago 3 has been tagged as a never again title, a record you, dear reader, will have to find for yourself.

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