2. misc-audio
  3. 164153-121242

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
fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,496 posts
 
What local record store?
Ever heard of Discogs?
There are gobs of the popular stuff around. I am happy to see that someone can make a living finding gems.
Not interested.
1812? I’d rather sit by the hill with the cannons.
Since I got the ultrasonic cleaner it is a whole new world here. On a pace with getting the first vax jab. Even my first LP, Sgt. Pepper’s mono sounds great.

millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Having never heard a Hot Stamper, I would say that, yes, this is excessive. However, I may change my mind once I do hear one.

That's the idea. That is why they have a no-questions 100% money back guarantee.

My first was Fleetwood Mac Rumours. Already had 3 copies- original release, Nautilus half-speed mastered, and a "audiophile" 45 RPM reissue. When I heard the White Hot Stamper it was so much better it was hard to believe. Still, $300, come on! Let Tom know yeah it is good but not worth $300. No problem, you can return it. Just like that.

Only funny thing, could not bring myself to ship it back. Sat there one week, two. Finally, okay, it has to go back. But just one more play first. Then it hit me: no way! No way you are sending this back! Nothing else on the shelf sounds this good!

Had a guy up from Portland last year, loves Fleetwood Mac, had me play him 2 tracks from the 45. "That's gonna be hard to beat!" he says. Then we listen to the same 2 from my White Hot Stamper. "Wow. You were right." It had been a while since I played the 45. Was really happy with the sound, it was the best yet- until I got used to the sound of A+++. Playing it for him, was actually hard to take. It is that big a difference.

Do you truly believe that out of the hundreds of thousands of records that are pressed of a title, that only a handful are of these magical sounding copies.

Yes. Demonstrably true. The Fleetwood Mac A+++ above is head and shoulders better than three other copies, two of them so-called "audiophile" pressings. I have many, many examples now. These records have been scrutinized down to the hot wax and Tom's Stampers are identical. So it definitely is the case that some copies simply sound way, way better than others.

Also, one of the first things I did even before ordering was my own shootout of records I had multiple copies of. Sure enough, they were not all the same! Most of them were very close. But there were ones where one copy had way more presence and detail than the other. There were ones where one copy sounded really, really good, except it was spitty with sibilance. So it is absolutely incontrovertibly true that record companies do not stamp out identical copies.

So for the most part record companies stamp out nothing but inferior copies and only a few are of high quality and worth listening to. Yea right!

This is the logical fallacy of the straw man. Never said most records aren't worth listening to. In fact if you read the OP it clearly says Clair deLune sounds great. Totally worth listening to. Just nowhere near as good as a Hot Stamper. I realize it might be a bit much to get your mind around, but the world is not nearly so cartoony black and white as you make it out to be.

I bought a hot stamper from Better Records, Supertramps Breakfast in America. I own a test pressing of the album that sounds better and an original pressing that I purchased when the album was released which sounds just as good as the hot stamper.

That's great. But I have to wonder. Most who actually bought one know Hot Stampers are graded. You do not buy a "hot stamper". You buy A+ (Hot Stamper), A++ Super Hot Stamper, or A+++ White Hot Stamper. They are even graded by side. Often times one will be A++ on one side, A+++ on the other.

These differences might not be readily apparent. If your system, or ears, are not up to it you might not notice at all.

Tom has some great tips scattered around his site. Things like the importance of warming up and demagnetizing. Most of it I already knew about but wasn't doing that often. Now in the last year since Tom made me more aware there is now a whole ritual series undertaken before serious listening sessions. Which with me almost all are serious listening sessions.

You might want to review some of this and see if it helps.

The reason why Better Records may sound better than the copy you own is because it is cleaned to perfection! Every bit of dirt, gunk, smoke residue or whatever else is found in a record groove has been removed.

This is certainly true, to an extent. Tom uses and recommends the Walker Enzyme 4 Step. After hearing how good his Stampers sound I changed to Walker. Sure enough, it is a big improvement over Disc Doctor, or whatever I had before. I'm using the same brushes just changing the cleaning solutions to Walker. The difference is all in the solutions, and the Walker are superior.

However, there's a lot more to a Hot Stamper than mere cleaning. The 45 was cleaned the same way. All my records now are cleaned with Walker. I do the full 4 steps, only the final rinse is on a VPI vs what Tom uses. They are pretty darn clean. It is not that simple.

whart's avatar
whart
2,966 posts
 
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
7,132 posts
 
I am only interested in promo and test pressings. 
Better get RTR deck and look for master tape dubs than paying hundreds of dollars for maybe slightly better sound. 
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Whart raises a good point and something I had to think about a lot. Stereo Review used to have this standard format for music reviews where they would rate the recording and the performance. The recording being the record/playback part of how it sounds. The performance being the quality of the music. Two very different things.

Hot Stampers add another level to this because now in addition to the quality of the recording we are also now giving weight to the quality of the pressing, as something distinctly separate and different from the recording. That is to say you can have an absolutely fabulous pressing, but if the recording quality (reference the master tape) is poor it is not going to suddenly magically improve just by being pressed real good. Stones, cough cough, Springsteen... 

Read through enough of the descriptions on better-records.com you will find this mentioned, and even some full articles expanding on it. This came up with my second one Peter Gabriel, So. A completely different sounding recording from Rumours yet also crazy good. Way better than I ever heard it anywhere else.

The Beatles Help, Elton John GBYBR, Honky Chateau, these are not going to magically transform into audiophile reference material. They do however sound so much better than anything I ever heard before it is literally like taking a step back in time to be there in the studio with them. Elton is right there in front of me, easily as spooky real as any other vocal on any really good recording. Nilsson Schmilsson, now there is a bona fide audiophile reference! Some of these tracks it is flat-out insane how good they sound. Transform your system, they will!

Several times now this level of improved sound quality has allowed me to really enjoy some music way more than I ever thought possible. Classical for example was one that was always sort of there on the shelf but never with any real desire to play. Now the 1812 is so emotionally powerful I can’t explain. It just is!

This is another area where Tom shines. This particular recording, he noted that not only is it A+++ quality, it is also (in his opinion) one of the best performances. Not being into classical that long I couldn’t say but the feeling comes across in the performance, for sure.

There’s definitely two sorts of audiophiles, the ones who enjoy listening to everything in the world once, and ones like me who crave spellbinding, have a hard time finding it, but when we do are happy to play it over and over again. A highly specialized market niche, for sure.
More to discover