My name is Tom Port and I and my staff find, clean, play and evaluate vintage vinyl records.
These records can be found on our website, Better Records.
First question: Who is ths blog for?
It’s for everybody!
Come to think of it, maybe it’s not for everybody.
It’s mostly for people who really like high-quality records.
The word quality above refers exclusively to sound quality, not vinyl quality or packaging quality, nor even music quality (!). For the most part it is limited to records produced seventy or more years ago, from the early-50s to the late-80s, with a relatively small number having been made after that.
We rarely like the sound of records pressed after the 1980s.
Rarely do we like records remastered for the audiophile market. We don’t think they sound very good, and if you want to learn more about their shortcomings, laid out chapter and verse, we dissect them by the hundreds here on the blog. Click on these links to see samples of our writing on the two worst offenders of the modern world: Heavy Vinyl. and Half-Speeds.
Having played many tens of thousands of records over the 37 years we’ve been selling them, we are quite certain that amazing sounding records like the ones we discuss here are a thing of the past. There is no one alive today who knows how to make them.
I, along with the help of our very talented staff, currently devote all of our working hours to cleaning, playing, evaluating and describing these very special vintage vinyl pressings. Like that old saw about robbing banks, that’s where the best sound is.
If you have the system for it, playing one of our records might put you on the path to a world of sound you had no idea existed.
Some of our customers have written to tell us about the effect our records had on them, and we don’t doubt for a minute that they’re telling the truth. As part of our unique process, we audition every record we sell. Of course we know what they’re talking about — we heard it for ourselves.
To learn more about records and their mysteries many and deep, please click on any of the links you see below.
To gain a better understanding of what Hot Stampers are and how you find them, click on either or both of these first two links:
Hot Stampers are exceptional pressings that have gone through a shootout and judged to have sound superior to other copies of the album.
We realized early on that a Hot Stamper not only needed the right markings in the dead wax, but it had to have been pressed properly on good vinyl.
Which meant that you actually had to play every copy of the record in order to know how good it sounded.
Predictions were of no use. There simply were no shortcuts. Every copy was unique and there was no way around that painfully inconvenient fact.
Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can get your hands on.
If you want to make judgments about recordings — not the pressing you have in your collection, but the actual recording it was made from — you have to do some work, and you have to do it much more thoroughly and carefully and above all scientifically than most audiophiles and record collectors think is necessary. Don’t be one of those guys. Do it right and get the results that are not possible with any other approach.
Yes, you do. You just don’t know which ones they are. If you have a good-sized collection of LPs, mastered and pressed from the 50s into the 80s, then you surely do.
Familiarity with the conventional wisdom regarding which labels and stampers are supposed to have better sound is really not much help in this regard. It’s often misleading when not outright erroneous.
The only way to recognize a Hot Stamper pressing is by putting it through a shootout.
If you want to skip all that and just buy some in order to hear what you’ve been missing, click here.
And before you play them, be sure to read this:
We’ve recently begun to include an info sheet with our orders which describes some simple steps you can take to get better results with our Hot Stamper pressings in your home. We have a section called playback advice with more along these lines.
Followed by this:
It is our strongly held belief that you have never really heard what’s in the grooves of your records until you’ve cleaned them using Prelude’s enzyme-based system. There is nothing in our experience that works as well.
To expand on the basics discussed in the introductions above, you might want to check out some of these next:
Experimenting with records is the only way to learn anything about their sound of real value.
Hot Stamper shootouts are simply the experiments we carry out in order to find the best sounding pressings of all the albums you see on our site.
I regret to say there is no such book and probably never will be. To my knowledge, we are the only guys on the planet selling records who know much about the subject. In fact, we pioneered the very concept, starting about twemty years ago.
Here you will find some ideas on becoming an expert listener from back in our early shootout days. Those shootouts, like this one, are the very thing that taught me how to improve my underdeveloped listening skills in the first place.
And if that’s not enough, these sections have a great deal more to say about records and the equipment you need to to get the most out of them.
Making improvements in the quality of your playback is not easy — nothing is in fact harder. However, if your approach to audio is clear-headed and evidence-based — in other words, scientific — progress is not only possible, it is virtually guaranteed.
Most of the listings compiled here describe lessons we’ve learned from playing so many records over the years. If you play lots of records and listen to them critically, some of them will teach you things about audio that are impossible to learn any other way.
We do not see records as an investment. We think audiophile-oriented music lovers should pursue good sounding records for the purpose of playing them and enjoying them, understanding that the better their records sound, the more enjoyable they will be.