I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a Better Records customer and proud of it. I’ve bought quite a few records from them over the past few years, and those records have proven themselves — with each revisit and after every system upgrade — to be the best of the best sounding records in my collection. And while I have managed to find quite a few great sounding records on my own, those records often have a harder time standing up to further scrutiny down the road.

Of course I’m not the only one who appreciates the work that Tom Port and his staff do for the more discerning of us analog audiophiles. I’ve read the many glowing comments and “letters” they’ve received from their satisfied customers, and clearly audiophiles are appreciating what they’re hearing on their Hot Stampers.

Still, I have wondered. Are there a good number of BR customers (not to mention their critics!) who haven’t even realized yet HOW good the records BR sells actually are? After all, how many audiophiles have gone to the trouble of building their systems in a way that will eke out every bit of AMAZINGNESS from a Hot Stamper? I’d venture to guess, not that many.

And it’s not that a Hot Stamper won’t beat just about any other copy on a system that’s not well built to play it. Case in point that of a friend of mine who’s invested far more money into his system than I have and built it to play high quality recordings of Grateful Dead shows. It does a pretty good job of reproducing those tapes, I’ll give him that. There’s WAY more bass on these tapes than your average lp, and his Wilson Alexia’s and beefy Ayre amp manage to handle it without imploding.

But my friend also owns a reasonably wide selection of Hot Stampers that I struggle to appreciate on his system. It frustrates me because his HS’s do sound better than the heavy vinyl reissues he’s slowly culling from his collection, but they barely scratch the surface of what they sound like on mine. I’ve made several suggestions on how he might improve things, but I think he’s afraid that if his he changed his system to make his HS’s sound better, his Dead tapes would sound worse, and he may very well be right.

But as I see it, those are changes more than worth making. I’ve made a number of recent improvements to my system that include installing an Anthony Gallo subwoofer, a Ventus Audio grounding box and, most significantly, moving my system into a dedicated room. This after adding the stunning EAR 324 phono preamp and installing a Dynavector Karat 17dx on my Triplanar tonearm, just a few of the many crazy good recommendations I’ve gotten from T.P. & company that have yet to disappoint.

Every one of these changes has brought my Hot Stampers more and more to life, including the very latest – putting a 50 lb weight I had just sitting around collecting dust on an empty shelf on my rack. a freebie that grew the size and weight of instruments and vocals considerably. It’s just one more improvement that’s helped me move my system to a place that makes it increasingly easier to evaluate records and pick the winners out among the records I own.

I’ve learned about quite a few of these winners by way of just looking at what Better Records sells, then rolling the dice on a copy to see if I might land a good one. Sometimes I’ve gotten some very good sounding records this way, and sometimes not, but this approach offers one nice assurance – at least I know that SOME copies of the title offer the POSSIBILITY for Hot Stamper sound.

A recent example is a copy of Charles Mingus’s Pre Bird I bought not long ago. I’d never heard of the album until I saw it come up on the BR website, but I’ve loved nearly ever other Mingus album I’d heard and was immediately intrigued by this one – a collection of songs mostly written by Mingus before he met Charlie Parker in the 1940’s, but that he didn’t record until 1961, post Bird but well into the golden age of jazz recording.

And what a recording it is! I can think of few jazz records I’ve heard that present instruments with as much size and weight and with the level of transparency and immediacy found on this album. I can also think of no other Mingus album where his bass is recorded as well as it is on this one. Want to get up close and personal with a stunning performance by a genius and arguably one of the greatest jazz composers and arrangers ever to pluck a string? Look no further than a good sounding copy of Pre Bird.

So far I’ve only bought one copy, but I expect I’ll buy at least one more. I’m curious to hear if another copy would sound as good as this one does, or better! Meanwhile, even as I write this, there is a Whit Hot Stamper for sale on the Better Records website. Curious to hear how THAT copy sounds, I wrote the nicest email I could and requested a loan that, I’m thrilled to say, was generously granted. Now I WILL get to find out how the WHS of Pre Bird sounds!

Here’s the thing, most of the time when we find a record that sounds great to us, we are hearing a record that merely hints at the potential for how good that record can sound. This has happened to me now more times now than I can even count. I find a record on a one off that sounds SO good to me that I think – can this EVER be beat? Only later do I find out that not only CAN it be beat, but beaten HANDILY! Not always mind you, but very, very often.

The Hot Stamper is more than a great sounding record. It is a record that realizes the full potential of the recording and the performance. With the right record on the right system, a record like Pre Bird is a rare and special thing that audiophiles owe it to themselves to experience.

So . . . how DOES the WHS of Pre Bird sound? Tune in next time to find out!