How do you know when an LP is a first or early pressing?

As Millercarbon said, the hot stampers from better records are great! One example of an original not sounding as good as a later reissue Is Miles Davis Kind of Blue. The original 6 eye Columbia is inferior in sound quality to the very early 70’s reissue on the Columbia red label.

OP, I can give you some examples what the numbers etched into the dead wax mean. Each record label has their own system.

Here’s an early 1st pressing of a Kate Bush album, the matrix number is:
YAX 5389-1
YAX 5390-1
The catalogue number and county of origin is included;
89 is side A, 90 is side B. The -1 means it’s the first production run on stamper #1.
The question is was this vinyl pressed early in the run when the stamper was new, or was it pressed late when the stamper was becoming worn and needed to be changed?
The only way I know of is to play it. There may be additional etched numbers which identify it. And the mastering engineer and record plant code may be scratched into the runout. A -2 may also be on a first pressing.

YAX 5389-4
YAX 5390-5
These are pressed later with a different stamper but may be of better SQ because they were at the beginning of the production run.

As stated earlier, the label is important in identifying early and late pressings. Record companies change the label for various reasons, eg, which country it’s released, reissue, early issue.

Steve Hoffman forum has lots of info on first issues and best quality pressings.

Discogs usually has all the info you need. The real fun starts when your buying records that Discogs doesn’t know about (yet)!

Mglik, I think that you are correct to be wary of ’hot stampers’. To my mind, the history of a record is a lot more important than its stamper: you know, what kind of blunt stylus was used to play it, if it was used as a dog’s frisby, and so on.

Let me tell you about something that you can control: how clean it is. Once you get into ultra-sonic record cleaning, you’ll never want to go back.

Good luck!

Discogs usually has all the info you need. The real fun starts when your buying records that Discogs doesn’t know about (yet)!

Then you can upload all the info yourself.
If there is not info yet then it will be there in the future, even if the record is extremely rare. The progression of discogs is huge, I remember when it was useless source, now it’s the best place to find all info about records, everyone can add or change info (if there is an error).