Better Records White Hot Stampers: Now the Story Can Be Told!


Just got shipping notification, so now the story can be told!

  Better-Records.com is a small, incredibly valuable yet little known company run out of Thousand Oaks, CA by Tom Port. The business started out many years ago when Tom Port noticed no two records sound quite the same. Evidently Tom is a sound quality fanatic on a scale maybe even higher than mine, and he started getting together with some of his audio buds doing shoot-outs in a friendly competition to see who has the best sounding copy.   

Over time this evolved into Better-Records.com, where the best of the best of these shoot-outs can be bought by regular guys like me who live for the sound, but just don't have the time or the drive to go through all the work of finding these rare gems.

The difference in quality between your average pressing and a White Hot Stamper is truly incredible. If you don't have the system or the ears of course you may never notice. If you do though then nothing else comes even close.   

Tom will say things like only one in twenty copies is Hot Stamper worthy. This doesn't even come close to conveying the magnitude. Last night for example, wife and I were listening to our White Hot Stamper of Tchaikovsky 1812. Then we played another White Hot Tchaikovsky. Then we played the Tchaikovsky tracks from my copy of Clair deLune.  

Without hearing a White Hot you would think Clair de Lune is about as good as it gets. After two sides of Tom's wonders it was flat, dull, mid-fi. Not even in the same ball park. And yet this is quite honestly a very good record. How many of these he has to clean, play, and compare to find the rare few magical sounding copies, I don't even know!  

Copies of Hot Stamper quality being so hard to find means of course they are not always available. This is not like going to the record store. There are not 50 copies of Year of the Cat just sitting around. Most of the time there are no copies at all. When there are, they get snapped up fast. Especially the popular titles. Fleetwood Mac Rumours, Tom Petty Southern Accents, whole bunch of em like this get sold pretty fast even in spite of the astronomically outrageous prices they command. Then again, since people pay - and fast - maybe not so outrageous after all.   

So I spent months looking, hoping for Year of the Cat to show up. When it did, YES! Click on it and.... Sorry, this copy is SOLD! What the...? It was only up a day! If that!  

Well now this puts me in a bit of a spot. Because, see, besides loving music and being obsessed with sound quality, I'm also enthusiastic about sharing this with others. With most things, no problem. Eric makes an endless supply of Tekton Moabs. Talking up Tekton or Townshend or whatever has no effect on my ability to get mine. With Better-records.com however the supply is so limited the last thing I need is more competition. Bit of a bind.   

Even so, can't keep my big mouth shut. Been telling everyone how great these are. One day someone buys one based on my recommendation, Tom finds out, next thing you know I'm a Good Customer. What does that mean? Well is there anything you're looking for? Year of the Cat. That's a hard one. Tell me about it. Might take a while. Take all the time you need. Just get me one. Please. Okay.  

That was months ago. Other day, hey we're doing a shoot-out. No guarantees but should be able to find you one. So for the last few days I was all Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And now finally, like I said, shipped!  

So now I have my Grail, and the story can be told. Got a nice little collection of Hot Stampers, and will be adding more, but this for me is The One. Might not be for you, but that is the beauty of it all. Many of us have that one special record we love. If you do too, and you want to hear it like listening to the master tape, this is the way to go.
128x128millercarbon

Showing 3 responses by whart

MC- I hope for your sake that the record proves to be what you hope for. I don’t begrudge anybody for using Tom Port, though I’ve never done business with him ( I think he started by selling DCC at blow out prices).
Most of what he stocks and sells, not surprisingly, are classic rock and warhorses since that’s where the market is. And there is no question that different pressings sound different and that two copies of the same pressing can sound different. Sometimes, the problem rests with the recording itself, and no amount of variation on the manufacturing side (or even the mastering side) will fully overcome the shortcomings despite the copy to copy differences. Sadly, for bands like LZ, the recordings just aren’t that good to start with. I easy have a dozen good copies of LZ1, from the Classic 45 (very audiophile detail but lacks the overall cohesiveness of the Piros mid-’70s SHForums fav, or the Japanese 2nd or 3rd press); LZ2- the RL Monarch is probably the most bombastic, but a good early UK plum rocks hard with more pronounced bass; III- the plum 5/5 Peter Grant credit is to my ears the best among those I have here, including a Canadian TG (which used to be a bargain but is hard to find), the Classic 33 and a few others.
The quest for me at this point isn’t quite as easy-- I filled a slot recently (still waiting for it to arrive given shipping issues from Germany)- an original Vertigo Swirl of Cressida Asylum. Even with that, I didn’t go the full distance by buying a German pressing rather than the UK which goes for 1k (or more) in the market.
I have a hard time with 4 figure records-- crazy money, to be sure, I’m not against spending money on records, but don’t even like the idea of regularly handling such expensive records and I buy them to play them, not to "collect".
The stuff I’ve been chasing for the last several years- small or private label jazz from the early 70s-- so-called "spiritual" or "soul" jazz has also gotten to be nutty money. A clean copy of Bobby Hamilton Dream Queen is now a 4 figure record. Some of the Strata -Easts are getting costly. A Milt Ward is also rare as well as expensive.
Like anything, you pay more for something desirable in the market. I’m not in the trade in the sense that I buy and sell records. One thing I have found, for whatever it’s worth, is that by having a broad palate for different kinds of music-- I opened up the range of what I listen to considerably in the last decade--- a lot of the records I’ve bought have increased considerably in value. I didn’t buy them as investments, and their value may go down by the time I pass this mortal coil. At that point, it won’t matter to me anyway.
Good luck and good hunting. (Which is, for many, part of the fun- the pursuit, the gotta have it, hunt it down, relentless won’t rest until I find it in great playing condition chase).
PS: cleaning- don't get me started... :)
Inna- the tapes for a lot of these more obscure records are gone. I'm trying to find out if the original master tape still exists for Alice Coltrane's Ptah the El Daoud. It's a marvelous recording that was done in the Coltrane family's home studio that was completed after John died. That record and several others were recorded by Alice there before she went into the ashram. The ambience of the thing is great. Copies are scarce on the market, and command money because it wasn't reissued-- the last extant pressing was 1974 if memory serves. 
The missing tape issue isn't uncommon. Sometimes safeties are used and that may be the source of the dubs. Leave aside the copyright issues- purely on the basis of access to music, tape narrows what is available to me. Otherwise I would have already gone that route. I'm aiming for good quality sound, but also interesting music and tape limits the latter by a wide margin. That isn't to say I could not come up with 100 tapes that probably are available if I choose to do that, but still....
@arizonabob- you are right. However, the first pressing is not always the best sounding copy in my experience. And I’m not talking about audiophile reissues done later but just stuff that was remastered or reissued along the way. I think it varies, depending on the record- every one is sui generis, you can take account of different pressing plants within the same country bearing the same deadwax info and they sound different too. Condition is of course a huge factor. Some records that are bombastic are inherently noisy; some of the stuff cut by Bell Sound sounds amped up. Some are chewed up from kludgey tone arms. Given the inflated price of vinyl and the very loose standards for grading, it can be a crap shoot unless you are lucky or deal with a trusted seller--
I found a stash of Nathan Davis records from the early ’70s after he returned from Paris that a guy basically got from a dumpster when the studio and plant closed. They were cheap and got expensive fast. Pressed on the thinnest vinyl I’ve ever encountered. Had a few bad ones- but the seller replaced them.
I don’t know that there is any easy answer or rule of thumb- place of origin? Some of the UK Islands were mastered by Sterling in NY. Searching out the best sounding iterations is different than collecting, though they overlap--- sometimes, the best sounding one is the earliest pressing from the country of origin and is also collectible. And sometimes, the records were produced in such small runs that you don’t have much choice except over the condition of the copy, particularly small to private label stuff or obscurities that never found a market and were pressed once (apart from much later reissues, some of dubious origin). Then there’s the vinyl quality itself, which declined precipitously in the ’70s in the U.S.
FWIW, I used to think that Japanese pressings were usually EQ’d brighter and relied on safeties but some jazz and early prog is good on Japanese-- as is some rock. I think you hunt, compare and try to find what matches your fervor, budget and what’s available- thus, folks with a dozen copies of the same record as part of the quest.