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Ten Years After – A Killer Audio Fidelity Gold CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

Our old commentary:

The BGO Import CD of this album is excellent. No match for a Hot Stamper of course, but dramatically better than the average classic rock CD, and quite a bit better than the domestic CDs we’ve auditioned, which are flat and badly lacking in Tubey Magic.

UPDATE 2014

The Audio Fidelity Gold CD mastered by Steve Hoffman is even better.

If you don’t want to buy a Hot Stamper LP, that CD is your best bet (assuming it sounds as good as mine, something one should not assume, but that’s a story for another day).

Compare the Gold CD and the Vinyl on The Original Soundtrack

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written sometime around 2004 I imagine. It references my old Legacy Whisper Speaker system, which I permanently replaced with the Legacy Focus shortly thereafter.

We sold off our Whispers long ago. You can read all about what we use now to find our Hot Stamper pressings in this listing.

As good as the DCC Gold CD is, this record has all the MAGIC of ANALOG vinyl — and then some. It’s the kind of sound you will never hear coming from a CD or digital source of any kind, trust me.

If there isn’t a huge difference in sound between the Hoffman DCC gold CD and your LP, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that you:

A.) Need a better front end (turntable, arm, cart, phono stage — which of course we are happy to help you acquire) or,

B.) You have a second- or third-rate pressing of the vinyl. 

UPDATE 2023

Note that as of 2023, we offer only a few select pieces of equipment: the Dynavector 17dx, the Townshend Platform, the EAR 324P, the Triplanar tonearm and maybe one or two more. Email for details if you are interested in any of the above.

Most likely it would be a combination of the two, which, if I can say it without sounding too smug or arrogant, is the most likely scenario.

I haven’t run into too many audiophiles who own a hot copy of The Original Soundtrack, or have the kind of system that can play a record like it. As I am fond of saying, this is the kind of record that is guaranteed to bring any audiophile stereo to its knees.

The recording itself is a tour de force, one reason I’ve been demonstrating my stereo with it for more than thirty years. The extended suite that opens side one, One Night in Paris, has ambience, sound effects, and incredibly dynamic multi-tracked vocals at its climax that will make your jaw drop.

Reinventing The Wall of Sound The Right Way

This is the kind of record that makes you sit up and take notice. It’s classic 10cc everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “Wall of Sound” sound (minus the Phil Spector distortion), the kind big speaker guys like me live for. Supertramp, Yes, Ambrosia, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Zeppelin, Bowie — to this day I’m a sucker for that Cinerama soundstage these bands like to play on. It’s one of the reasons I am a proud owner of the Legacy Whisper speaker system, complete with its eight fifteen inch woofer driver complement. You need that kind of piston power to produce The Really Big Sound with Super Low Distortion at Really High Levels. The louder the better. (We have a pair of highly modified Focuses set up in our listening room as well. Three twelves per channel moves a fair amount of air too.)

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The Soft Parade – Our Shootout Winner from 2007

More of the Music of The Doors

This incredibly rare, exceptionally quiet Elektra Gold Label LP sounds AMAZING, As Good As It Gets (AGAIG)! The sound is BIG, RICH, and FULL-BODIED, exactly the way it should be.

As good as the Hot Stamper Big Red E Label copies can be, and that’s very good indeed, the right first pressing is still The King. It just can’t be beat. 

The difference might only be 5%, but on a big dynamic speaker playing at loud levels that 5% can really give the sound the boost it needs to go over the top into crazy Demo Disc Land.

How rare is a clean, properly mastered gold label original like this? So rare this is THE FIRST ONE WE’VE EVER LISTED on the site! I think I run into one like this about every five years. Most of the gold label pressings we come across are full of groove distortion, covered with scratches and skips, and often have no top end left after being ploughed with a bad needle.

I’m sure the console stereo on which I first played my copy of The Soft Parade tracked at five or ten grams. The fine squiggles that carry the most delicate extended highs gets shaved off pretty quickly at that weight, and once they’re gone they’re gone for good. We never noticed because the frequency response of the speakers in those cabinets probably topped out at 6k, if that. (This is why so many dealers on Ebay don’t hear the surface noise on the beat up records they sell — no top end, no surface noise to worry about! Works out great for everybody except us audiophiles who actually care about the sound of our records, not just the color of their labels.)

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The Cars – The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

Hot Stamper Pressings of New Wave Recordings Available Now

This is a commentary from many years ago.

As you may remember from our last go around with The Cars’ debut, we proclaimed that new White Hot Stampers had been discovered, and indeed they had. These, dear reader, are the very ones of which we spoke, and let me assure you, they are every bit as good. They just plain blow the doors off our previous favorites, which is both shocking and wonderful.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

Talk about jumping out of the speakers, the energy level of this copy is completely OFF THE CHARTS. You’ve probably heard these songs a million times, but you’ve NEVER heard them sound like this. Both sides have FREAKISHLY GOOD SOUND — dynamic, spacious and ALIVE!

Sides One and Two

Side one is OUT OF THIS WORLD! The material is superb — just check out the first three tracks: Let The Good Times Roll, Best Friend’s Girl, and Just What I Needed — how many albums start off with that kind of a bang? Each of those tracks sounds amazing — if you’ve got big speakers and a phono stage capable of resolving musical information at the highest levels, put this record on, turn it way up and get ready to hear some serious DEMONSTRATION QUALITY SOUND.

The guitars are meaty and grungy beyond belief, the synths have so much texture, and the drums are some of the punchiest you’ll ever hear. The overall sound is rich, full, present, dynamic and ALIVE! We rate side one an A+++ — it’s As Good As It Gets (AGAIG!)

Side two is every bit as good — super transparent, with amazing presence — the best we heard for ANY SIDE TWO — not to mention generous amounts of ambience. Moving In Stereo sounds SUPERB here — just listen to that floating synth and the full-bodied vocals. The top end is Right On The Money; check out the superb extension and the silky quality the cymbals have.

Candy-O Blew Our Minds

When we did our Candy-O shootout back in 2007, we had never before heard Demo Disc sound on a new wave record. Times have changed, though, and we owe much of that change to our EAR 324 Phono stage, which is capable of resolving at a much higher level than anything we had before. That super high resolution has allowed us to find the magic in the grooves that we always hoped was there.

And now we KNOW it is. Just listen to all the texture to the synthesizers or the character of the distortion on the guitar. Roy Thomas Baker (the man behind Queen) engineered this album, and he did a stellar job — it’s an amazing sounding recording, and a pressing like this gives you entree to all of that magic.

The DCC Gold CD is pretty darn good, one of Steve’s best, but it can’t begin to compete with this kind of seriously Hot Stamper vinyl.

Power Choruses

The hottest of the Hot Stampers did one easily recognizable thing better than the Also-Rans, and it was apparent pretty much from the get-go. The multi-multi-multi-tracked choruses on the best copies don’t strain (a very common problem), they are bigger and more powerful, they stretch from wall to wall, and the voices that make them up are separated much more than on other copies. I won’t say you can make out all the players — there are dozens of tracks overdubbed together don’t you know — but you can make out some of the voices. At least you can if you have the kind of high resolution front end that we do. Big speakers help a lot too, giving space for each voice to occupy. What small driver speakers do to an album like this is a travesty, but that’s a horse we have already beaten savagely in more than enough places on the site, so we’ll leave that problem for the listener to solve.

Big Dynamic Speakers

Which means that if you have big dynamic speakers and like to rock, you can’t go wrong here. Neil Young albums have the Big Rock sound, and if you’re more of a Classic Rock kind of listener, that’s a good way to go. We’re behind you all the way, just check out the majority of the Hot Stampers on the site: CSN, Zep, Tull, The Stones — we can’t get enough of the stuff.

Still, variety is the spice of life, and the Cars really deliver the good on this new wave classic. If you love big meaty guitar chords, wild synth sounds, and HUGE punchy drums, this record may be just what you needed… so let the good times roll!