Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
Some vintage OJC pressings sound good and some don’t.
Typical bad OJC sound – thin and modern, lacking in the Tubey Magic that makes vintage pressings so musically involving.
This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the OJC pressings we played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that that plays right into the prejudices of most record collectors and audiophiles for whom nothing but an original will do. They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played.
The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large sample.
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.
You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.
Credits
Alto Saxophone – Jackie McLean
Bass – Addison Farmer
Congas – Candido
Cover – Tom Hannan
Drums – Art Taylor
Liner Notes – Ira Gitler
Piano – Duke Jordan
Recorded By – Van Gelder*
Supervised By – Bob Weinstock
Tenor Saxophone – Gene Ammons
Trumpet – Art Farmer
Notes
Recorded in Hackensack, NJ; April 23, 1956.
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.
Further Reading