The very first Hot Stamper I ever bought was a copy of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. I can still remember sitting my wife down to discuss it, telling her how I wanted to spend ONE HUNDRED dollars on a record from this highly unusual and fascinating record business I’d just discovered, Better Records.

At the time, that seemed like an awful lot of money to spend on a record. I explained that I had become near obsessed with what Better Records was doing – comparing multiple copies of the same title and finding the ones that sounded the best, then selling them at a premium. I had to know what one of their records sounded like. Better Records’ business concept and the type of collecting they supported captured my imagination in ways that collecting records in a more conventional way never had.

I had previously only wanted any copy of this or that title in my collection. Now I knew I wanted not just any copy, but one that also sounded good. What I didn’t know was that the conventional approach to collecting was going to be much harder to get away from than I would have thought.

Without realizing what I was doing, I conflated the two approaches to collecting. Yes, I now wanted a good sounding copies, but I didn’t understand I had to work hard to get them. I was often content with “good enough” sounding copies if they’d fill a hole in my collection so I could turn my attention to other titles.

Fortunately, that was the last time I had to have a talk with my wife before buying a record. I soon introduced an ingenious monthly spending allowance that would liberate us both from looking askance at the other when returning home with yet another shopping bag, or when one more box arrived on our doorstep. She could spend as much of her allowance as she liked on the skin care products and shoes she coveted, and I was now free to build my collection of great sounding records and rebuild my stereo to be able to play them.

At the time I bought the Hot Stamper of Diamond Dogs, I owned another copy, a US pressing. If you’d have asked me then to give my copy a sonic grade, I would have had very little idea what to tell you. A “B” maybe? Maybe a “B+”? Hard to say really.

Meanwhile, the German reissue that arrived, expertly cleaned in its fortress-like packaging and nestled in the highest quality inner and outer sleeves, was graded A+ on both sides! That’s clearly a big step up from a B or a B+.  And it sounded that way too, showing me just how inferior my domestic pressing was, even on the less-than-mediocre system I had at the time.

I now had not just any copy of the Bowie record I wanted, I had one that I knew didn’t suck. It was graded A+, afterall. Not too shabby! I crossed that title off my list and moved on to the next one, content with good enough.

A year or so later I bought a couple more Hot Stampers, this time a pair of Beatles records I needed to fill a GAPING hole in my collection, Rubber Soul and Revolver. Both of them were a step up in sonic grade from my Diamond Dogs. Each earned grades of “A+ – A++” on each side.

And once again, they sounded that way! I had only ever listened to US pressings of Beatles titles, and these UK reissues from Better Records were head and shoulders and torso above any I’d ever heard. Once again, money well spent, and 2 more good enough sounding copies of titles I could now scratch off my list.

Fast forward several years, many more Hot Stampers later and a completely different stereo to play them on, and I put my copy of Revolver into my first full-fledged shootout against 7 other copies. I even made a video of it that you can view from this site. I tried to conduct my shootout as close to the way the staff of Better Records does them as I could. It was an experience that taught me some valuable lessons about the work they do and the records they sell, and it provided some important insights into my own approach to collecting and evaluating records.

One of those lessons is that proper shootouts, those done with the number of copies Better Records uses, are time consuming and hard! After a few hours, I got tired, and it became more difficult to hear the differences between each copy. I think at one point I say in the video “they’re all starting to sound good.”

Nevertheless, one did emerge as the clear winner. And since that copy was among those on loan from Better Records and had gone through a shootout there, I was able to confirm with them that it was, indeed, the best of the copies they sent me. Not their shootout winner mind you. That one, the White Hot Stamper, was already long sold. This one was their second place finisher, a Nearly White Hot Stamper with A++-A+++ grades on each side. Needless to say, my Hot Stamper of Revolver didn’t rise to the top.

Which brings up the second thing I learned doing my shootout with Revolver. Tom Port says numerous times on his website, The Skeptical Audiophile, that you need to have 8 to 10 copies of a record to do a proper shootout. I had always assumed that this number just represented the frequency with which a copy that reached the level of White Hot Stamper would surface.

That may very well be the case, but what I also realized doing the shootout, and what has become clearer to me since, is that you need that many copies to really appreciate what sets the very special copies apart. Without a bunch of other copies there to provide context, it’s very hard to know which copy of a given title should be considered the best that title has to offer. That’s assuming, of course, that the best is what you’re aiming for.

By this time I had brought my system to a place where I could start to appreciate the shortcomings of the “lesser” Hot Stampers I owned. It’s worth mentioning here that with very few exceptions, Better Records no longer sells records graded A+ – A++ on both sides. The lowest tier records they currently sell must earn a grade of at least A++ on at least one side. And as far as I know they never sell any record graded less than A+ – A++, such as my A+ copy of Diamond Dogs. The company has raised their already extremely high standards, perhaps even beyond what many of their customers can fully appreciate.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I wouldn’t be surprised if many if not most of Better Records customers fail to appreciate just HOW good the records they’ve bought from them really are. The company sells products that frequently exceed the capabilities of the vast majority of stereos playing them. I’m still pulling out Super Hot stampers I’ve bought over the years and discovering that, after making a great many improvements to my system, I can now clearly hear I haven’t really been hearing that clearly just how good these records are, and I haven’t been for quite some time.

And even though I’ve built my stereo to bring out the best in a Hot Stamper, and even with the progress I’ve made, I am still misjudging records more often than I’d care to admit. Sure, I can hear how good a White Hot Stamper sounds when I have the chance to hear one, but I still make mistakes, and that’s mostly because I don’t always evaluate records by doing proper shootouts.

Case it point, just a couple of weeks ago I learned that Better Records was putting together a shootout for Thelonius Monk’s Brilliant Corners. I discovered this because I had received an order from them through my Discogs account for a copy of the record I had for sale.

I had put that copy up for sale because I was convinced that a different copy I had, one with different stampers, was superior. I sent them the copy they ordered, and also told them who I was and asked if I could send them another I wanted to enter into the shootout. They agreed, and I shipped it off and waited for the results.

Before too long, I got an email from Tom. The shootout had happened, and he wanted to know what I’d like done with my copy. When I asked him how well my copy had done in the shootout, he said “poorly,” and he sent me the grades and the notes the staff had made on its sound. He also said my copy wasn’t competitive because mine didn’t have the “right” stampers.

He sent me the stamper sheet for my copy, as compared to the shootout winner, and the first thing I noticed on it were the sonic grades. My copy, the one with the wrong stampers, had still managed to earn a grade of A+ – A++ on one side, and A+ on the other. I thought to myself, “hey, I didn’t get that totally wrong! A+ – A++ isn’t a bad record.”

Then I looked at the listening notes, which described my copy as “less natural, dry / flat” and with “pinched horns @ peaks.” That’s when I realized, as far as I might have come over the past several years, part of me was still stuck in the thinking of my 50 year old self. I was still thinking that this record was good enough.

I realized I was too quick to judge the record and hadn’t taken the time to evaluate it properly. A part of me was still collecting just to collect, and on some level hadn’t fully embraced what another part of me had long ago concluded was the only way any self-respecting analog audiopile ought to collect records – seek out the copies with the best sound possible and do the work necessary to find them.

I knew then that I needed to buy some more copies of Brilliant Corners and do a proper shootout. A record that had been a favorite jazz album of mine for the better part of 4 decades deserved better than A+ sound. I also knew that now I had the stereo that could deliver the goods.

I managed to find one more copy with the “right” stampers and conducted the shootout with the help of 3 loaner copies from Better Records. One of those 3 loaner copies is the White Hot Stamper currently available on their website.

Yesterday and today I conducted the shootout and made my notes for each copy. It was, to say the least, compelling. If you’re interested, I’ll share the results, as well as what I learned doing the shootout on the video above.

And if you’d like to know how I would grade these records, here’s my breakdown:

“A” Copy:      A++-A+++ side 1      A+++ side 2

“B” Copy:      A+-A++ side 1          A+-A++ side 2

“1” Copy:      A++ side 1                A+++ side 2

“2” Copy:      A+-A++ side 1         A++ side 2

“3” Copy:      A+++ side 1             A++-A+++ side 2

“C” Copy:      A+ side 1                 A+ side 2

I’ll point out here that I agreed with how the staff at Better Records graded their shootout winner, which was the “3” copy. The first side was a shade better than the first, and the best of all of the copies for that side.

As you might gather from the rankings above, the second side got a little murkier for me. If I could have held onto the records I had borrowed for a while longer, I would have liked to really dial in which copy nailed that side.

For now, let’s just say that there was a small amount of tradeoff between having a bit more bass (copies 1 & 3) and having amazing transparency (copy A). When you’re playing only very good to great copies of a record, sometimes whether one copy had the right amount of bass or didn’t gets into some pretty fine hair-splitting.

But it’s important to keep in mind that, on some systems, copies with more bass can sound less transparent and vice versa. I’ve made some improvements recently that have resulted in much better bass articulation than I had just a few months ago. Now the picture on bass has gotten clearer, and I can better understand that sometimes, records sound like they have more bass because the bass isn’t as tight and well resolving. In other words, the bass is a bit more “boomy,” causing the record to sound like it has more of it.

Meanwhile, records that have excellent bass sometimes only reveal that when the volume is right and other circumstances are optimal (see my recent article on electricity). The mistake I made with my “wrong stamper” copy, copy “C”, was that I just didn’t play it loudly enough.

At too low a volume, this “C” copy seemed to have more bass than the “right stamper” copy I had (copy 2?). But at the right volume, I couldn’t hear into the recording on this “wrong stamper” copy in the way I could on the better copies, and this was particularly true for the bass.

The better copies didn’t just have bass, they had the sound of a double bass and the various bass notes it can play with all of the nuances in the way the instrument can sound. This is what transparency gives us on a system that plays bass well – bass that’s nuanced, musical and thoroughly engaging.