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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.
millercarbon
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Fremer is right, as far as he goes. The way I think of those kind of hot wax stamper things is, you can use it to avoid buying a whole lot of crap that may have come off a crap stamper. A crap stamper will stamp crap from the first pressing until forever. But a really good stamper, one where everything was done right, that still does not guarantee every record pressed is magically A+++ level sound quality. I bet even if you somehow had the first hundred or thousand or whatever copies pressed, even that would be no guarantee. It might well be that the first really good A+++ copy is not #1 or #32 or even #576 but #2389 off that stamper. Might be, then again might not. Point is we just don't know. Would have to be there playing them as they come off in order to know. Never happen. Certainly not gonna happen now, 50 years after the fact. So all we can do is play, listen, evaluate, choose.  

Yeah it is pretty cool. I was just over at Mike Lavigne's place the other night. Mike has this vast collection of recordings. Some of em on multiple records AND also on tape! One record, he was telling me how the original sounds better than the later reissue because even though the reissue was made with much greater care and attention to detail it was made from a tape that was much older and tape degrades just sitting there not even being played. Records, everyone loves to complain about surface noise but one thing about a record, it does not degrade just sitting there.

Look, when the entire human race was sending the first Voyager spacecraft out and knew it would ultimately one day be the first thing to leave the Solar system and who knows maybe encounter extraterrestrial life, and we wanted to communicate, how did we do it? Put a record on it. Because Carl Sagan knew it would not degrade, and anyone anywhere could play it. Cool as cool can be.
glupson
7,842 posts
 
Look, when the entire human race was sending the first Voyager spacecraft.........and we wanted to communicate, how did we do it? Put a record on it. Because Carl Sagan knew it would not degrade, and anyone anywhere could play it. Cool as cool can be.

It would have been quite unexpected to put FLAC files on it in 1977. Or a CD, for that matter.

"Carl Sagan knew it would not degrade, and anyone anywhere could play it."

Carl Sagan must have been hopeful that Martians’ would adjust VTA properly.

Even if all of that were true, it seems that Carl Sagan did not believe in non-degradable record technology Mike Lavigne, millercarbon, me, or anyone else, have at home...

"The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches (30 cm) in diameter. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years."

Voyager - Making of the Golden Record (nasa.gov)

There are some instructions on the cover, and it does seem that the turntable is included...

Voyager - The Golden Record Cover (nasa.gov)

"Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form."

"The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute."
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,493 posts
 
Every LP is of course the end product of a number of separate manufacturing steps. And the term "master tape" has a couple of equally valid definitions: since the introduction of first the 3-track machine---then the 4-track, 8-track, 16-track, etc---there is both the multi-track master and the final 2-track mixdown master.

Every piece of gear used to make an LP has an effect upon the PVC disc you place on your turntable. The recording microphones and their related electronics (mic pre-amps, etc.), the multi-track recorder, the 2-track mixdown deck, the recording and mixing consoles, the outboard gear (limiters, equalizers, etc.)---everything. Then the lacquer-cutting machine and it’s electronics, the talent of the mastering engineer, the quality of the "fathers" and then "mothers" created from the lacquer, the plating of the mothers, the quality of the stampers (each mother is used to make a certain number of stampers, and each stamper a certain number of LP’s, those numbers a reflection of the quality standards of all involved), the quality of the PVC used to make the LP, and on and on.

The matter of original pressings vs. "audiophile" reissues has been raised. When Music Direct bought MoFi, they hired Tim de Paravicini (EAR Yoshino, Luxman) to design a perfectionist mastering chain. Kavi Alexander had previously hired Tim to design electronics for the recorder he uses to make his incredible Water Lily label recordings. The electronics employed in the making of mass-produced LP’s (whether White Hot Stamper or otherwise) vary in quality, but it is quite safe to assume that none approach the quality of that found in the LP-producing equipment found at Mofi’s RTI pressing plant, Analogue Productions’ QRP, and Pallas in Germany. It is like comparing a mass-market budget surround-sound receiver to a high-end pre-amp and power amp (such as made by EAR Yoshino and Luxman). And the 180 gram PVC pellets those plants use to make their LP’s is vastly better than was the vinyl used in the 60’s/70’s/80, etc.

When Kevin Gray and Ryan K. Smith create a new production master tape for an audiophile reissue, they spend a lot of time and money finding the original 3, 4, 8, or 16-track master (whether 1/2", 1", or 2"), the 1st-generation 2-track midown tape (either 1/4" or 1/2"), or both. They then use high a high quality system of electronics and recorders to create that new master tape. The newly-created master is used to cut a new lacquer, a new father and mother, and new stampers, all done to the highest standards. If you think mass-produced LP’s (routinely made from 2nd or 3rd-generation "safety" tapes) were ever made with this degree of care, you are free to try to find a few "good" ones.

It is arguable that every audiophile-quality LP is a White Hot Stamper disc, as the reissue companies press a very low number of LP’s from each stamper, all copies therefore being far more alike that dissimilar. The question then becomes: Does the passage of time from the making of the recording have more of a deleterious effect on the sound of the master tape than do all the factors covered above, or visa versa? For a good test, compare an original UK "pink" label Island Tea For The Tillerman to the current Analogue Productions LP. I have my answer.

Not even mentioned are the compromises made in mastering and LP production in the old days. Bass was routinely rolled off below 100Hz (or summed to mono---or both), and compression was applied to reduce dynamic range, and that’s just to name two. The best LP’s ever made are those being made now, by far.
inna
8,240 posts
 
Right. MoFi reissue of Bitches Brew album is a complete junk compared to the original US 360 sound record and to the first Japanese pressing.
Japanese JVC vinyl from 70s is great and very quiet.
And who needs these 180g records ? This is BS.

oregonpapa's avatar
oregonpapa
4,867 posts
 
inna6, >>>

Right you are. I was listening to an early stereo LP of Vic Damon on an original Columbia six-eye tonight. The man was right in front of me.

Frank
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