I wonder if those who shell out the ridiculous amount of money for Port's hot stampers ever stop to think about the sheer absurdity of what he purports to be selling. I do agree there are differences in sound between pressings of the same record or even within the same pressing. However, there were hundreds of thousands of copies pressed, if not millions, of many of the most popular records he sells. The idea that you can go out there, find a few copies of those records, do a "shootout" and find a "white hot stamper" over and over again with different titles based on his resources and process is statistically impossible.
What I suspect is happening is that he obtains several copies of a title and grades them within that batch based on their sonic merit. The best sounding of the batch gets a white hot stamper rating and a ridiculous sticker price to go with it. But in the absolute sense, another copy may sound just as good or better than his white hot stamper, based just on the number of copies pressed and the impossibly monumental task of listening to enough copies of the same record to label any of them superior to other copies. You can only compare among the copies you have. How many does he use in his shootout? 5, 7, 10, 15 (doubtful)? Never enough to be able to legitimately declare something is sonically superior to the 99% or even 75% copies out there that he'll never listen to.
Then the insecure and lazy well-off audiophiles pay the crazy price and blindly content themselves with the idea that their copy sounds better than any other copy out there, because a guy with no basic understanding of audio equipment told them so. Just sad.
