Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now
After discovering Hot Stampers and the mind-blowing sound they deliver, a new customer generously sent me a few of his favorite Heavy Vinyl pressings to audition, records that he considered the best of the modern reissues that he owns.
He admitted that most of what he has on Heavy Vinyl is not very good, and now that he can clearly hear what he has been missing, having played some of our best Hot Stamper jazz pressings, he is going to be putting them up on Ebay and selling them to anyone foolish enough to throw their money away on this kind of junk vinyl.
We say more power to him. That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just the ones that are supposed to be good sounding, perhaps because they were custom manufactured with the utmost care and marketed at high prices to soi-disant audiophiles.
Audiophile records are a scam. They always have been and always will be.
The three of us who do the critical listening here at Better Records dropped the needle on the first disc in this set and, once the VTA was properly adjusted, gave it a chance to show us just what expert remastering from vintage mono tapes, at 45 RPM, on two slabs of luscious, thick vinyl, could do for the sound of Thad Jones’s trumpet, circa 1956.
The reissue we are playing is the one Music Matters released in 2010. There was a single disc version released by them in 2016, recut by Kevin Gray and Ron Rambach. At the time of this writing, there is one for sale on Discogs for $235.
None of us had ever heard the album on any media, vinyl or otherwise, but we know a good sounding jazz record when we hear one, and we knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.
Two minutes was all it took, but we wasted another ten making sure it was as bad as we thought.
For those of you who might have trouble reading my handwriting, my notes read:
- CD sound
To my ear this disc does not sound much like the wonderful vintage analog recordings we play every day. It might make a passable CD, but I have hundreds of CDs that sound better than this album, so even setting the bar that low, I would say it’s unlikely I would want to have this set in my collection.
Who can find the time to play a mediocrity such as this. And who needs the bother of flipping it over three times for less than ten minutes a side?
If you like CD sound, buy the CD. It will play all the way through and it costs a whole lot less money than this crap vinyl pressing.
- Boosted sloppy bass
This was by far the biggest problem with the sound. The bass is really boosted. It constantly calls attention to itself. It is the kind of sloppy, droning upper-bass that cannot be found on any RVG recording, none that I have ever heard anyway, and I’ve heard them by the hundreds.
You no doubt know about the phony boosted bass on the remastered Beatles albums. It’s that sound. Irritating in the extreme, and ridiculously wrong.
- Good space
The album’s best quality. CDs can have good space, so why shouldn’t this CD-like record share in that quality?
- Still dry horns
Not the sound of the horns that RVG is famous for. Somebody screwed them up in the mastering.
Bad cutting equipment? Bad EQ? Both?
What else could it be?
- Wears out its welcome
Between the boosted bass and the dry horns, the sound of these remastered audiophile discs gets old fast.
- Needs heavy tubes
This pressing badly lacks Tubey Magic.
If you have an old school vintage tube system with heavy tube colorations, you have the ideal system to get this record to sound better than it is, and better than I will ever get it to sound. As I have said many times on the site, a system like the one I owned in the 70s (Audio Research) and again in the 90s (McIntosh MC-30s) would put me out of business today.
I need to know what is on the records I play, warts and all, not the euphonic colorations my stereo equipment wants me to hear.
- No real top
Space, yes, but not much air. Practically all the Heavy Vinyl records we play have no real extension on the top end. You can adjust your VTA until you’re blue in the face, it’s just not something these discs reproduce well.
RTI pressings are serial offenders in this regard. We find them uniformly insufferable.
Lessons to Learn?
Think twice before spending your money on the work of any of the people responsible for this awful record, assuming you want good sound.
Label: Blue Note – 1527, Music Matters Ltd. – MMBLP-1527
Series: Blue Note The Definitive 45 RPM Reissue Series –
Format: 2 × Vinyl, 12″, 45 RPM, Album, Mono, Reissue, Remastered, Limited Edition .
Lacquer Cut At – AcousTech Mastering
Pressed By – Record Technology Incorporated – 18830
Recorded By – Rudy Van Gelder
Remastered By – Kevin Gray, Steve Hoffman
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 200 at this stage of the game.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still somewhat impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records sound have such poor sound, they had me so pissed off I was motivated to create a special ring of hell for them.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.