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
HA ha - you got me- maybe you are a trial lawyer!  
I wasn’t trying to say albums don’t get worn out, just that wear isn’t inevitable if using the right cart and kept clean.  Acetates are not meant to survive repeated playback, but a very low mass design like Strain Gauge doesn’t wear even the most fragile of LP’s out.  

My experience is pretty similar to Millercarbon's, and others here. I figured I'd share some of my thoughts. I posted this on another forum, but it got taken down pretty quickly ... go figure. 

Last summer, I came across an original mono pressing of Mingus Ah Um in one of my local shops. It was labelled as a “top copy” and the surface looked pretty good, but far from perfect. The price was a little absurd, and considering I had the OneStep and the Classic Records pressings, I wasn’t sure I needed it. But, this is an album I loved, even as a kid, even on digital, and a first pressing held a lot of allure. I took some time to think about it, do some online comparison shopping, and by the time I got back to the shop, it was gone. In a fit of pique, I bought the copy Better-Records was selling. It was listed as a Super Hot Stamper, and it was slightly cheaper than the copy the shop was selling. With a 30-day no-questions-asked return policy, it seemed a safe bet.

Well, you can imagine my disappointment when it arrived a few days later. Nicely boxed for shipping, I unsleeved what was clearly a later pressing. My disappointment magnified when the needle dropped and the first thing I heard was surface noise. I’ve been conditioned by the heavy vinyl renaissance to equate surface noise with a bad sounding record. 

But then, the instruments kicked in, and from the first notes I could tell I was listening to something really different. It was clear, forward, and dynamic. Nothing harsh, even in the horns, but so much more engaging and rich than I was used to. It was the first drum solo that convinced me I was hearing something special in this pressing. I sat and listened to the entire record without doing anything else, and for me, something that holds my attention to where I don’t want to grab my phone or a book is part of what defines a peak listening experience. 

I was intrigued. They also had a Super Hot Stamper of Abraxas listed. Owning the Mofi one step, along with a few other pressings, and this being another album I’ve loved for years, I decided to take the man at his word and see if his copy could unseat those. The presentation of the hot stamper and the onestep are really different. The hot stamper reaches out and grabs you. The percussion is forward, hitting you right in the chest. The onestep is huger, it fills the room with a massive soundstage. The instruments on the onestep are less differentiated, except (on my system, at least, which tends to be bright) for the chimes and hi hat hits, which absolutely stand out. The onestep has some tape hiss I don’t hear on the hot stamper early pressing. I love a black background, which my tube preamp doesn’t really have in the first place, so I find that tape hiss a little objectionable, since it further compromises a weak spot in my system. My thirteen year old prefers the mofi; I prefer the hot stamper. 

I’m an empiricist, so naturally I looked up the matrix numbers on Discogs. For $30 I purchased a copy that had matching matrix numbers, at least as close as I could get them. (You feel kinda stupid when you send a discogs seller three messages saying, “but would you say that’s a faint N or a faint Z scrawled in the deadwax?” Enough already. Just buy the stupid thing.) This copy had a family resemblance to my hot stamper in terms of its sound, and it was also in near mint condition with no evident listening damage. But, the experience is different. I recognize what I’m describing is the complete opposite of A/B double-blind testing, but which is the copy I keep putting on, feeling engrossed and enlivened by with spin after spin? (The miniscule writing in the dead wax was indeed not identical, so the experiment wasn’t perfect, but it was enough for me to have trust that hot stampers are a good value proposition for me.) 

I’m now ten Hot Stampers in, and planning to cool it, at least for a little while. I’ve been able to get many of my favorites (Stardust, Rumors, Mahavishnu, some Zeppelin, some Ella, some Beatles) in Hot Stamper format. That’s good enough for me while I let the funds replenish and start giving some thought to a speaker upgrade. I can say this has been true in my experience - no matter how many other pressings of a title you have, if you buy a Better Records Hot Stamper, you can play it in a “shootout” style against the rest of your stack of that title, and you will find that either it bests them all, or at very least, it gives you a different presentation that you will value and want to hold on to. For me, this has been true for ten of the eleven purchases I’ve made. Try it sometime. Even if you start with the regular hot stampers, you’ll hear they are different. 

So, although I have a solid "collectable" collection that I hope and expect will hold its value over the years to come, it is with joy, relief, and a sense of relaxation that I shift my record-buying focus now to listenability rather than collectability. As we cope with the ever-growing onslaught of new pressings and inflation in the prices we’re seeing on discogs, listenability is a great way to cut through the noise and put your record-buying money where it matters. 

It is really hard to buy for listenability anywhere other than on Better Records. Maybe if you have a friend who wants to sell you some of his records, you could do it. But, if you’re buying on Discogs or ebay, you’re not buying for how things sound. Occasionally, you can hear listening descriptions as part of the seller’s grading, but those are not comparisons to other pressings of the same title. And, as much as I like to support my local record stores, when it comes to listening first as a basis for buying, you can basically forget about it.

So in all, I feel I've had enough positive experiences with Better Records that it's time for me to feel good about adding my voice to the "hot stamper" chorus - I tried it pretty thoroughly, and now I'm a believer. Pick a favorite album and give it a try!

I read through a lot of comments, then skipped over a lot as well, but I ultimately decided to have another look at what Better Records has on offer. After all, a “White Hot Stamper” (is that a new Goldmine grading?) of a favorite record could be worth two hundred bucks to me.

Well, my word! What a bunch of stale, half-eaten sandwiches. Most of the albums listed may sound good but the music is crap. Lots of second and third rate offerings released from artists who were well past their prime at the time of release. So picked over. If you are a serious collector who strays beyond the Beatles or Stones or Miles Davis, good luck. Maybe Tom’s business is so good that we’re left eating spinach dip out of a bread bowl. That would be my charitable conclusion. But my uncharitable conclusion is that he appeals to audiophiles of a certain vintage, with a certain taste in music, with a certain amount of disposable income, because that’s the most profitable business model for him. I am totally fine with that. It’s just not for me.

 

I’ll remember a few tips from this thread though.

1) Pay up for clean records - it’s worth it.

2) Promo copies (the ones with the stamps on the back, not the cut-outs!) are worth searching out.

3) Avoid most North American pressings. Too many pressed per stamper and inferior PVC.

4) Be careful of the hype. Many of the record descriptions on the Better Records website talk about “tubey magic.” Huh? Records made in the 70s (Tom’s sweet spot by the look of it) have tubey magic? How so? Plus, am I missing something? Where can I find out which pressing version is for sale? Is it listed in the description?

 

I love this hobby. Between gear and records, it consumes a good chunk of my leisure time. Some of the most fun I have is coming across my own White Hot Stampers. Their rarity is what makes it so addictive.

Why let Tom have all the fun?

 

 

 

 

 

 

My White Hot Stamper of Tea for the Tillerman was unbelievably superior to my AP copy.  Thankfully, I got to sell my AP copy for a pretty penny.