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Hot stampers (great sound/expensive) Super hot stampers (really great sound/really expensive) White hot stampers (insanely great sound/insanely expensive) That can sound nice, but I need accuracy." "Tubes make everything sound warm and add distortion. "I use a low-power, solid state amp because it doesn't color the music," he explains. Grunt work completed, the hot stamper king and his minions meet in the Better Records listening room for a round of tests dubbed a "Shootout."īy the standards of your stereotypical tube-loving, power-junkie audiophile, the amp Port uses as the hub of his Shootout machine is shockingly ordinary: a 1970s Japanese integrated transistor amp rated at a feeble 30 watts per channel, a typical thrift-store find. Next comes the obligatory spa regimen: a three-step enzyme wash followed by a deep groove vacuuming with two record cleaning machines, one of them an $8,000 Odyssey RCM MKV, an instrument the size of an airline beverage cart handcrafted by persnickety Germans. The painstaking process begins by scouring the used market-from Salvation Army bins to eBay-for a dozen or more clean copies of an album. It's preferable to have a record pressed early in a production run, before the metal exhibits signs of wear, rather than toward the end, right before a fresh stamper is slapped on. In contrast, during the peak of the vinyl boom, major labels churned out as many as 10,000 copies on a single stamper. To ensure the best sound quality, some boutique companies that press heavy vinyl today limit their stampers to 1,000 pressings. The accumulation of scratches, flaws, and other damage resulting from the tremendous mechanical stress a stamper is subjected to-100 tons of pressure during a production run-leads to a gradual loss of audio fidelity in the finished records. Like any metal die, these molds have a finite lifespan. One factor many serious record collectors fixate on is the quality of the stampers, the grooved metal plates used to press a lump of hot vinyl into a record album. Hundreds of factors determine what a vintage record will sound like, from the chain of ownership and whether it's been properly stored to the purity of the vinyl stock and the quality of the equipment that produced it.