Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stevie Wonder Available Now
Full disclosure: This commentary was written more than ten years ago and probably updated a bit here and there since then.
I’ve just gone to this reviewer’s website to make sure the quote below is accurate, and everything you need to see is still up and as misguided as ever.
Some audiophiles never learn, and a great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles avoid the errors this reviewer and others like him have been making for decades. In the mid-90s I wrote my first commentary about the awful audiophile records this person had raved about in his review in one of the audiophile rags.
In the years since it seems that nothing has changed. Bad sounding audiophile pressings make up the bulk of this person’s favorable reviews to this day. Here are 157 of them.
How it is possible to spend so much time doing something, yet learn so little in the process? It is frankly beyond me.
I put the question to you again:
Is this a well-engineered album?
The first question that comes to mind is:
How on Earth could anyone possibly know such a thing?
Some background. Years ago our first Hot Stamper shootout for Songs in the Key of Life had us enthusiastically singing its praises:
Hot Stampers discovered for one of the funkiest and most consistent double albums of all time! It’s beyond difficult to find great sounding Stevie Wonder vinyl, but here’s a copy that proves it’s possible if you try hard enough. So many copies are terrible in so many different ways — we should know, we played them. And just to be clear, this copy is far from perfect as well, but it did more things right in more places than we ever expected it would or could. And that means it showed us a great sounding Stevie Wonder record we never knew existed.
But a well known reviewer says it’s a bad recording. Does he know something we don’t?