We continued:
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.
We do a much better job of cleaning our records than we did even a year or two ago. In fact, any record that hasn't been cleaned within the last 12 months or so gets recleaned and replayed in the next shootout, and many of them sound better and play quieter than our original grades would indicate.
How to Find Our Quietest Records
This LINK will take you to the records on the site that earned our highest play grade, Mint Minus. As you can see, they are exceptionally rare. At the time of this writing there are currently four to be found, and some of those are only quiet on one side (!). Really quiet records -- at least according to the very high standards we set -- are hard to come by.
However, for those who like their records to play with minimal surface noise, I recommend a quiet cartridge and very high quality arm and table. In my experience they should be good for at least one grade improvement in surface noise. They should be able to take you from "Mint Minus Minus" -- the grade even brand new records from the '70s might play at -- to "Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus" or something very close to it.
I have heard many of my quietest pressings play noisy on very expensive equipment owned by friends. I've made an effort to help some of them fix their problems, mostly in vain. Most audiophiles have a bad of habit of getting married to their equipment, which makes it hard to find solutions to problems. The solution is more often than not different equipment. I've found this especially true in the case of cartridges.
One Further Note
The Record Cleaning Advice you see to the left talks about how we clean our records. There are some fluids on the market that may get your records to play quieter than the fluids we use, but we have yet to hear such fluids make the records sound as good as they do with the Walker System we use.
Again, it's a matter of tradeoffs. We want the best sound for our records, period. Apparently our customers do too, as less than 1% of the records we sell get returned for surface noise.
General Information
Many of the basic questions concerning Hot Stampers, including our grading system, 2-packs, coupons, the mailing list, as well as more general ordering and payment information, can be found in our original Frequently Asked Questions section.
We think sitting down to listen to a Hot Stamper pressing is the best way to appreciate its superior sound, in the same way that hearing a vintage LP played back on a top quality system is the best way to appreciate the superiority of analog. Short of getting you to try one of our records -- 100% guaranteed, no questions asked -- we hope the above comments will be of value.
If you have further questions feel free to contact me at tom@better-records.com. I will do my best to answer them.
