Sounds like a hot stamper! Jackpot Records, Willie Nelson, "....and then I wrote"

@bdp24 Thanks for taking the time to make that informational post. You make a lot of positive contributions to the site and I appreciate it.

I buy a lot of white label promos and they are often very good. I'm aware of the different pressing plants, but have never done comparisons to be able to say that they each have their own sonic characteristics.

I have on occasion bought multiple copies of the same title trying to get a "good one".

I understand why better records charges what they do and have no issue with that. Supply and demand, cost of business and all that. 

That said.....Folks, Hot Stampers are everywhere!  We just have to find them.  I prefer the journey, but I'd be open to forking over $500 for the best copy of a handful of albums.  

We already have some hot stampers in our collections!

Yes technically, based on mathematical probability, if you have a hundred records there may be one in there somewhere. That is about what it would have to be. 

I like to test things out and so one of the first things I did after hearing about this was to take the LPs I had two or more of the same and do my own shoot-outs. Sure enough, no two were ever quite the same. I remember getting excited when one copy was a lot more open and detailed than another. Eureka! Until a minute later that copy had really messy sibilance. Oh.

Now about a dozen or so Hot Stampers later it is clear none of my couple hundred records is Hot Stamper level. Not a one. This is not to say they all sound bad. People love to twist that one around. This is not a zero sum game folks! They just don't have that Master Tape level of detail that characterizes a Hot Stamper.

Frankly, I love the luxuriously liquid sound on my 45 Jennifer Warnes The Well just as much as any Hot Stamper. At the same time, if this makes any sense, I wish I had a Hot Stamper of that same LP. Somewhere among the 5k or so pressings is probably one that is simply extraordinarily good. Probably. Maybe. If we had them all to compare....

I neglected to cover one other factor in the LP sound equation, that of the mastering engineer. The vast majority of LP titles were mastered only once, and all LP’s of that title were made from that one original lacquer (what a mastering engineer "cuts". After that the lacquer is used as the source for for the following steps in LP production).

However, some titles were mastered more than once, with the resulting lacquers then producing completely different versions of the title. The most famous example of this is Led Zeppelin II. The original lacquer was cut by Robert Ludwig, and can be idenntified by his "RL" initials cut into the dead wax of LP’s made from that laqcquer. Ludwig cut the lacquer so "hot" that the record players of many 1969 listeners would skip. Receiving a lot of returned "defective" LP’s, Atlantic Records had another engineer cut a new lacquer, one less hot. The RL pressings are now quite collectable, worth far more than non-RL pressings.

One album I love is Truth Decay by T Bone Burnett. The album was released in 1980 on Takoma Records, which was at that time being distributed by Chrysalis Records. The LP contains not only great music, but in great sound. While browsing in the bins at Moby Disc in Sherman Oaks in the early-90’s, I saw a copy of the LP for cheap, so bought it in order to have a back-up copy. I didn’t notice that though still on Takoma, THIS copy was being distributed by Allegiance Records. I played the LP, and as the last song on side 1 ("Driving Wheel") came to it’s "false" ending, I waited for the musicians to come back in one by one, leading the song to it’s eventual fade-out. What I instead heard was.....nothing!

Allegiance had had the LP remastered, and whomever the mastering engineer was didn’t realize the false ending was just that---false. When cutting the new lacquer he heard the music stop, so he cut off the side at that point. When looking for a copy of Truth Decay, make sure the cover reads distributed by Chrysalis Records. ;-)

Wow, T Bone Burnett released something on John Fahey's label? That is cool. 

Well @jbhiller, it was actually Fahey who released it ;-) . T Bone was signed to the label by well known producer Denny Bruce (Fahey himself, Leo Kottke, The Fab T-Birds, The Blasters). Oddly, he is listed as the album’s "director".

It’s a real good album, with a lot of great players providing T Bone with musical accompaniment: Billy Swan (in the pic on the back cover), David Miner (heard on the albums of T Bone’s early group The Alpha band), the fantastic Tulsa drummer David Kemper (who did some playing with Dylan), Jerry McGee, Stephen Bruton, a bunch of others.