More Straight Answers to Your Hot Stamper Questions
The easiest and shortest version of the answer would go something like:
Hot Stampers are exceptional pressings that have gone through a shootout and judged to have sound superior to other copies of the album under review.
My good friend Robert Pincus coined the term more thirty years ago. We were both fans of the second Blood, Sweat and Tears album, a record that normally does not sound very good, and when he would find a great sounding copy of an album like B,S&T, he would sell it to me as a Hot Stamper. It was a favorite album and I wanted to hear it sound its best.
Even back then we knew there were a lot of different stampers for that record — it sold millions of copies and was Number One on the charts for 8 weeks in 1969 — but there was one set of stampers we had discovered that seemed to be head and shoulders better than all the others. Side one was 1AA and side two was IAJ. Nothing we played could beat a copy of the record with those stampers.
More Than Just the Right Stampers
After we’d found more and more 1AA/ IAJ copies — check out the picture of more than 40 laid out on the floor — it became obvious that some copies with the right stampers sounded better than other copies with those same stampers.
We realized that a Hot Stamper not only had to have the right numbers in the dead wax, but it had to have been pressed properly on good vinyl.
All of which meant that you actually had to play each copy of the record in order to know how good it sounded.
There were no shortcuts. There were no rules of thumb. Every copy was unique and there was no way around that painfully inconvenient fact.