Fellow vinyl lovers,

So I’ve recently gone done yet another audiophile rabbit hole with vinyl pressing plants.  This all started with my seeking out an audiophile copy of the Empire Strikes Back album with John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra.  As I searched Discogs….I found the same album pressed at different plants here in the US.  

I found this thread on the Hoffman Forums that goes into more detail and figured I would share.  Going forward I hope this thread serves as a springboard for guys to post any related info on pressing plants, and any experience they have with an album they own that came from a specific plant.

In this instance I actually decided to move towards a Japanese pressing of this Star Wars album due to lower production numbers and better quality of the material used make the album.  I am a actually targeting a promo copy that is said to be even more rare due to it being pressed very close to the original stampers.  

Here is the link to the Hoffman forum that talks about the different pressing plants.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pressing-plant-difference.835250/

FYI……Page 2 was vey informative and where I originally landed.

Yes anything from UHQR that I have gotten has been excellent.  Don’t have any from Monarch, but I’ve read that they are great as well.  When I buy from Discogs I only buy VG+ at a minimum.    

So I pulled the trigger and bought the Promo copy.  The seller also had it listed on eBay, so I opted to go through through them instead of Discogs.  

Man, one can spend a lot of energy and time researching pressings and plants and different issues. If I weren't expending time and energy elsewhere I would be inclined to indulge in thise efforts as well.

When I gave up turntables in the early eighties I entered a few decades without listening to vinyl and sold the best items I had (couldn't believe some of the offers I had!) Now on my second wave of vinyl listening, on about my fourteenth year or so, I find I really like to have albums from the late fifties--they just tend to sound so so good. And that I like reissues of pre-tape jazz (from the 'teens through the 'forties) on LP as they sound really good often besting even the most meticulous cd restoration--they had more original parts and better existing 78s then and had more of a sense how the originals were envisioned to sound and engineers familiar with transfers and mastering this material. So when I get the urge to buy records those are my first targets, and then there are a number of jazz LPs that have not made it to cd from the 'sixties and beyond that I look for good copies of. I don't really delve into different pressings etc. as most all vinyl sounds really good in my system, and as it's only about 5 percent of my total listening experience I don't fret too much over fine details that I might find from different releases. (And reading this I realize I'm only interested any longer in jazz releases.)

But boy do I understand the interest and effort.

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I'm in no position to dispute that, but if you're buying a 60ish year old album today it is almost certainly used and the details of its life history (how it was played and stored) are probably more important than the quality control of the original production. I did most of my LP buying in the 80s when those albums were 20 or 30 years old and my experience is a lot of the older ones, even the ones that looked pristine, weren't that great even after a thorough wet cleaning. Not as good as obviously cheaper made LPs from the 70s into the 80s. Just one (recovering) vinyl addicts story, YMMV as always.