- A "cut-out" is not an early pressing of an LP title, and is in fact amongst the last copies of a title made. When the sales figures for a given title drop below a certain number in a calendar year, the record company may decide to delete the title from it’s catalog. When it does, they cut off a corner of the cover (or drill a hole in it, or cut a notch) of the remaining LP’s, sending the cut-out copies to retail outlets. This can be from only a couple of years after the title was released, to many years later. Whether any given copy was made from a fresh stamper is impossible to determine. Or how fresh the production master (the tape used in LP production, which is usually a couple of generations removed from the final 2-track mixdown "master" tape) the stamper was made from is.
- There is some confusion about the signifcance of a cut/drilled/notched LP cover. Not only do cut-outs (as explained above, discontinued titles) exhibit that feature, so do some "promotional" copies sent to radio and retail outlets---the latter for in-store play---in advance of the release date of a title. Instead of a cut in the cover, the cover may just exhibit a "PROMO" stamp. It is THOSE copies that are early pressings of a title. But that STILL doesn’t necessarily mean a promo LP will have been pressed using a fresh stamper. Do you know how many promo copies of a title were pressed? Thousands.
- It is the "white label" promos that are becoming more valued amongst collectors. A white label promo is exactly as it sounds: in place of the record company’s stock label, there is instead a white label, with plain text lettering containing the album title, songs, and artist. It is white label promos that have a greater chance of being hot stampers than any other general group of copies. But it is the earliest copies made off a fresh stamper that are the best sounding. Each LP pressed creates a minute amount of wear in the stamper, each stamper being replaced when the wear reaches a certain level, that level determined by the standards of each given pressing plant.
- One commonly over-looked factor is at which pressing facility any given LP was pressed. The major lables had plants at several locations around the U.S.A., and the numbers in the "dead wax" (the area between the last track and the record label) may indicate at which plant the LP was pressed. Each pressing plant is known for it’s sound character/quality, and different collectors favour different pressing plants.
All the above (and more---different copies of LP’s are of course made at different times of the day, some production managers acknowledging that copies made later in the day sound different from those made in the morning) should tell you that getting a "best" pressing of a given LP title is purely random. The best plants in the world (RTI, Pallas, QRP, Optimal) go to great lengths to minimize quality variation, and are making the highest quality LP’s the world has ever seen.
