When you shop for vinyl in various flea and high end markets, you realize that record-collecting, like life (to quote Forrest Gump) “is just like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” And that is one of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of collecting vinyl records.
Did you know that even records of identical albums are not created equal? This was what I found out when my audio system reached the level where distinct nuances of layering, sound staging, depth, and almost all attributes discriminating music lovers look for in a system became palpable.
There are instances when so-called audiophile LPs when played pale in comparison to their non-audiophile-grade counterpart. The latter is regularly pressed, while the former — obviously targeting the audiophile market — is carefully re-mastered and issued on usually thick vinyls.
At first, the proposition put forth by Tom Port in his widely visited website dccblowout.com seemed ludicrous to me. How could record albums, recorded from the same master tape and pressed by the same metal parts, sound differently? I found it absurd until a few tweaks done over time on my system produced results that proved Tom’s theory. With the tweaks — speaker positioning, tube rolling, cart and tone arm alignment and with every component having broken in over time to perform at optimum levels — I swear I could now tell the difference.
After experimenting on my own, I invited friends over to my listening room and they too agreed with Tom’s theory. You see, what Tom does is to buy hundreds of LPs of the same album; clean them, listen to them and compare one with the other. He then selects the best-sounding from among the five cleanest copies from the crop. He names these records “Super Hot Stampers.” He would thereafter rank the others as “White Hot Stampers” and “Hot Stampers.”
Tom will then sell these records at what his critics call “astronomical prices.” Astronomical it is, with each album costing between $300 and $1,000, and Tom has scores of buyers, including Filipino audiophiles.
Stampers of course refers to the silver-copper mold in which recorded music is stored in its groove. It is then pressed onto the molten vinyl which will harden flat in seconds containing the exact impressions of the mold’s groove, producing a record.
Tom explains that record mastering is an art, not a science. One engineer’s cutting can sound dramatically different from another: “There are also many things that can go wrong after the acetate is cut. I won’t go into all of them; suffice to say that when the record sounds good, lots of things had to have gone right. And when the record sounds really good, unusually good, sometimes as good as we’ve ever heard it, we call such a hot sounding record a Hot Stamper LP.”
Tom adds that he goes through the hassle of discovering and making available to the discriminating record collector what he believes to be the best-sounding LPs ever made. Hot Stampers have their strongest appeal among those who place a premium on higher fidelity pressings. Tom caters to that small group of music lovers who really want the best sound; those who believe that a “good” LP simply isn’t good enough.
What really makes Hot Stampers different from so-called audiophile LPs?
Tom says that some recording companies identify their LPs as audiophile grade, loosely-defining what “audiophile records” should be. He says audiophile records more often than not simply refer to a record that has been pressed on heavy vinyl or has undergone several techniques such as 45rpm and half-speed recording. “These don’t guarantee that the record will sound good, and the proof of that statement is easily demonstrated. Simply pick a handful of these so-called audiophile pressings at random and play them. You will notice that they vary widely in fidelity, from very poor to very good and every grade between. What should we call the ones that have very poor sound? Are they really audiophile records?”
I may not have done this experiment as extensively as Tom has been doing, but I believe that there are audiophile records that do not sound “good.” When the time comes that your system is able to tell the difference, you’d be surprised to discover that many LPs fail to make the grade.
The main issue put forth by Tom’s critics is economics. Many audiophiles, for one, cannot afford his Hot Stampers. But this is precisely what makes this hobby stimulating. If you can’t afford Tom’s services for finding the fidelity you look for in a recording, why not search for it yourself? Find the record you think would be most special to you.
I’m resigned to the fact that some LPs in my collection may not meet the Hot Stamper standard. However, until you make an actual comparison, you may never really know if you have something that a few can-afford audiophiles would call hot.
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com or http://bikini-bottom.proboards80.com/index.cgi for quick answers to your audio concerns.