Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now
Another weak sounding jazz reissue on Original Jazz Classics from the 80s.
Don’t get us wrong — they are a lot of good ones. Here is the list of the OJCs we’ve auditioned and found to have at least the potential for good sound.
And here are the OJCs we’ve auditioned and found wanting to some degree.
Not all of them are bad; some are just not very good and would not be suitable for an audiophile with high standards.
Credits
Bass – Teddy Kotick (tracks: A1, A2, A4 to B1, B3, B5)
Drums – Paul Motian (tracks: A1, A2, A4 to B1, B3, B5)
Engineer – Jack Higgins
Liner Notes – Orrin Keepnews
Piano – Bill Evans
Producer – Bill Grauer, Orrin Keepnews
An OJC pressing like this one is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues often sounded quite good on the older systems, and I should know, I used to have an old school stereo, and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).
Even as late as the 90s and early 2000s, our old system was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one. (Yes, I actually owned the ridiculously slow and colored Mac 30s you see here.)
Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from similar afflictions.
And, like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great. The reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve top quality sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutionary advances in audio had not yet come to pass.
It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until we here at Better Records would have anything like the system we have now.
Our Service to You
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.
Some of these records may have passable sound but the music is too weak to be worthwhile. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.