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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
bluemoodriver
193 posts
 
Glupson - do make sure those are double blind listening sessions, won’t you?  
Nobody wants to pay a $250 premium for placebo effects. I’m sure a $10 premium is all that is needed to trigger the  “I paid more for that copy and I am told by the retailer that it sounds better and I think they are right and I can hear better sounds”

But if a double blind produces and unambiguous vote for the WHS, then we have all learned some valuable things, including:

- sifting through multiple pressings to find the best one or two is worthwhile. - there is a fee to pay for that legitimate service if someone is to do it for you. - when you buy vinyl other than through such a value-added route, you don’t know what quality you are getting, 

and most importantly:

- the more of these services there are, the less likely it is you will find gems at normal prices. - as the cream is lifted out for premium resale, the quality of what remain will as an average do down. 
thecarpathian
4,154 posts
 
If you have a copy or two of a particular album, then purchase what is advertised as a White Hot Stamping, and this new album sounds just like one of your old ones, how do you know if you just purchased a clunker, or if one of your copies was already a White Hot Stamping?
glupson
7,842 posts
 
Going back in order:

jetter,

I thought of Tekton and Raven, but realized that my approach may be better. With Tekton and Raven, everything would sound like White Hot Stamper, if not even better. It would defeat the purpose of the test.

bluemoodriver,

It will not be double blind test although it may be dimmed lights test. Just too lazy to take it to some lab level and my friend is sane enough for me to expect him to refuse to get up and change multiple records more than once every 20 minutes. Maybe we could try to teach the dog how to do it, but that dog is not the brightest one out there so no double blind study. I believe it will be applicable result anyways. The point of listening to White Hot Stamper, or anything else, is to actually listen to it in real life, not under the test conditions. So, I think, it would be fine if some bias makes it sound better. The end result is still "better" and is what might be expected under the regular conditions. Not that I can claim to be free of bias, but in this I am as unbiased as one can get. And as experienced with that particular album as anyone could be. I am doing it for curiosity, not to steer me into buying or not buying White Hot Stampers in the future. Of course, it is not excluded, but I barely ever listen to records.

If White Hot Stamper is really that great, it may be worth paying someone to find it for you. As long as your hourly income is higher than of that person finding it for you. Time is money they say. Even then, one has to decide where the cutoff for "too expensive" is.

thecarpathian,

In my hopeful experiment, that is why we will have three different records to compare with White Hot Stamper. They may all be clunkers, or they may all be great, pressed on different continents and possibly in different years. That would shed the light on the technology itself and how much should be reasonably expected from the format.

If the only way someone will be satisfied with the sound of a record is by buying White Hot Stampers at $100-600 a pop (and click), we are approaching rarity of offerings and price of reel-to-reel indulgence. I could see a person buying a few favorite records like that for birthday.
glupson
7,842 posts
 
Unfortunate thing with this kind of approach is that it means nothing to anybody except to the one doing it.

There was a thread Talk but not walk some time ago. It was a place to say and claim anything. From Kim Jong Un to geometry of wings on the plane to amplifiers and to anything else you could imagine.

Michael Green claimed that amplifiers sound significantly better without the cover. The premise was that people only talk, but never try so whatever they say is worthless. I pulled an older NAD C-350 out of the box and took the cover off. Nothing. It was all the same. I did it for a while, but nothing changed. I reported that result and got blasted for doing it. Apparently, doing it was not enough. It just showed how I did not know what I was doing despite me taking the cover off as mentioned in the thread. All of a sudden, taking the cover off was called "barely scratching the surface". I was to cut some plastic ties inside the amplifier so orchestra will spread on the stage and similar claims. I did not do it, my room could barely fit that orchestra in their snugly positions, as destroying a perfectly functioning amplifier just to potentially read it was not enough did not appeal to me. There could have been more and more that would be needed to prove how taking the cover off an amplifier improves the sound.

In short, by doing the experiment and reporting results, I was told my findings were worthless. Granted, it was not a single, much less double, blind study but if the only way to discern the difference was to spend hours under sterile condition it was not worth the effort. That is when I realized who talks and who walks.

Don’t even start me on piano keys and pressure in the room.
thecarpathian
4,154 posts
 
Well? Well?
Did Carol come through??
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