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VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?) |
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Mint Minus Minus |
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Mint Minus Minus |
We just finished our first ever shootout for the classic 2112, and here's a wonderful copy with two impressive sides ! We've collected a bunch of these over the years -- it took ages to find pressings that delivered the kind of sound our customers expect from a Better Records Hot Stamper. Most Rush records sound godawful, but this one actually has the potential to be amazing -- as long as you've got the right copy!
If you're a fan of the band, you know what these guys are about -- big-time technical prowess, dizzying effects, powerful solos and so forth. You've got to have a very good pressing with serious clarity and lots of energy if you want that magic to come through in the grooves. Many copies we played didn't let you hear just how hard these guys are shredding... and then what's the point? If the musicianship gets lost in the mastering, why bother with this band at all? We were looking for copies that didn't let us forget who we were listening to. Put simply, we wanted copies that melted our faces off, just like this music would do live!
Learning the Record
For our recent shootout we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought would have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.
If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that other pressings do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given copy reproduces those passages.
The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle -- or fail -- to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
It may be a lot of work but it sure ain't rocket science, and we never pretended it was. Just the opposite: from day one we've explained how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. (The problem is that unless your a crazy person who bought multiple copies of the same album there is no way to know if any given copy is truly Hot Stamper. Hot Stampers are not merely good sounding records. They are copies that win shootouts. This is a fact that cannot be emphasized too strongly.
As your stereo and room improve, as you take advantage of new cleaning technologies, as you find new and interesting pressings to evaluate, you may even be inclined to start the shootout process all over again, to find the hidden gem, the killer copy that blows away what you thought was the best.
You can't find it by looking at it. You have to clean it and play it, and always against other pressings of the same album. There is no other way.
For the more popular records on the site such as the Beatles titles we have easily done more than twenty, maybe even as many as thirty to forty shootouts.
And very likely learned something new from every one.
