Month: January 2022

Should You Collect the Original Pressing on Lush Life?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

Should you collect the original pressings on this title?

Absolutely not. Which means we were way off the mark with Lush Life.

It’s yet another case of live and learn. Previously we had written:

“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”

We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our best Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.

Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? No doubt. If you want to spend your day searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league, a league we had no idea even existed until just this year.

By the way, the mono original we played was by far the worst sound I have ever heard for the album.

By far.

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The Oscar Peterson Trio – Put On A Happy Face

More Oscar Peterson

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Oscar Peterson

  • INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides of this original Verve stereo pressing
  • The transparency of a killer analog pressing such as this has the power to transport you to the front row of a small ’60s jazz club – what a thrill!
  • These live sessions produced four LPs worth of material, with The Trio and The Sound of the Trio being the most famous of the four
  • “The Oscar Peterson Trio’s 1961 live sessions at Chicago’s London House are considered among their finest recordings… Essential Jazz Classics.”
  • If you’re a fan of Live Jazz Piano Trio recordings, this is a Verve from 1966 that belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1966 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Prince – For You

More Prince

More Soul, Blues, and Rhythm and Blues

  • Both sides here are out of this world — incredibly full-bodied, musical and Tubey Magical with a massive bottom end 
  • “On his debut album, For You, Prince shows exceptional skill for arranging and performing mainstream urban R&B and funk…” – All Music
  • If you’re a fan of Prince’s, a killer copy of his album from 1978 belongs in your collection

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Dvorak / Cello Concerto – Hard to Recommend on Living Stereo

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

I have never heard a copy of this record sound better than decent. This title is very unlikely to have the wonderful sound of the best Living Stereo pressings that you can find on our site, each of which has been carefully evaluated to the highest standards.

If you can get one for cheap, go for it. Otherwise I recommend you pass if what you are looking for is audiophile quality sound.

Perhaps the poor recording quality (I’m guessing; obviously I’ve never heard the master tape) explains the poor sound of the Classic Records remastered version from 1994.

Not that that stopped anybody from buying those awful 180 gram pressings! They may have been mastered by one of the greats, Bernie Grundman, but he was well past his prime when he was working for that awful label, as we explain here.

Have You Noticed?

If you are a fan of Living Stereo pressings, have you noticed that many of them – this one for example – don’t sound all that good?

If you’re an audiophile with good equipment, you should have. But did you? Or did you buy into the hype surrounding these rare LSC pressings and just ignore the problems with the sound?

There is an abundance of hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and most of them are downright awful.

Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.

It seems as if the audiophile public has completely fallen for these modern Heavy Vinyl pressings.

Audiophiles have made the mistake of approaching these records without the slightest trace of skepticism. How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.

Maybe not this guy, or this guy, but there has to be at least some group of audiophiles, however small their number might be, with decent equipment and two working ears out there, right? (Excluding our customers of course, they have to know what is going on to spend the kind of money they spend on our records. And then write us all those letters.)

I would say RCA’s track record during the ’50s and ’60s is a pretty good one, offering (potentially) excellent sound for roughly one out of every three titles or so.

But that means that odds are there would be a lot of dogs in their catalog. This is definitely one of them.

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Letter of the Week – Wow, It Beat the Analogue Productions Fantasy 45!

More Contemporary Label Jazz

Many years ago, our good customer Victor sent us this note to tell us how much better his real Contemporary jazz album sounded compared to the Fantasy 45 180g pressing he owns.

We should point out that we sold him a sealed ’70s reissue, something (selling sealed records) we stopped doing a decade or so ago, and that we really have no way of knowing what the record actually sounded like. Given our experience with anything released on the consistently dreadful Analogue Productions label, what were the chances that they could actually beat the real thing? As a practical matter, the answer should be obvious: none, of course.

None? Too harsh you say? Here are two of their worst crimes against jazz-loving audiophiles, crimes they committed using 2 Heavy Vinyl discs mastered at 45 RPM for all the world to hear:

  1. Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus by the Vince Guaraldi Trio
  2. Sonny Rollins Plus 4

Yes, they had the temerity to charge money for their crappy, pointless reissues. The key takeaway here is that any label that would release records that sound as bad as these cannot be trusted to do anything right.

Having played many of their remastered releases, we are still waiting for the record on the AP lable that is not either a disaster or, at the very least, not clearly worse sounding than other pressings which are widely available.

And I will never tire of pointing out how bad the two albums linked below are, so bad that I wrote many hundreds of words about their astonishing awfulness.

  1. Steppenwolf – Gold: Their Great Hits
  2. Cat Stevens – Tea for the Tillerman

After playing the above four, what would possess us to ever play another?

Now to the letter.

Hi Tom,

Wanted to let you know I did a comparison between the yellow label Contemporary label Curtis Counce, Counceltation Vol. 2 (which I bought sealed from you) and a Fantasy 45 rpm from Analogue productions: Curtis Counce – You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce – which is in fact the same album but with a different title and cover. 

Well I was very anxious to try this comparison, but was not expecting the results. The yellow label was so transparent and tonal weight to the Fantasy 45 rpm there was no contest. The 45 rpm sounded like someone turned on a high bypass filter. The yellow label was balanced throughout. Clean.

I am a subscriber of the Fantasy 45s and own all of them. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice sounding ones in the series, but this is a prime example that not all records are as well mastered.

Regards,

Victor

Victor,

I had every confidence that the real Contemporary pressing would trounce that 180 gram reissue, 45 RPM 2 LP pressing or no 45 RPM 2 LP pressing. The more I play these Heavy Vinyl reissues the less I like them. As we say, the real thing just can’t be beat.

Thanks for doing the shootout for us. You can be sure that our Hot Stamper Contemporary jazz pressings will make mincemeat of anything on that Fantasy 45 Series. In fact, we guarantee it.

Mose Allison – Mose Alive!

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Early Pressing

Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Early Pressings

  • An outstanding copy of this wonderful live album, with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • This copy is full-bodied and natural, with a nicely extended top end, plenty of space around the instruments, and relatively few of the problems that plague many of the pressings we played
  • “Allison was one of the finest songwriters in blues of the 20th and early 21st centuries.” – All Music Bio

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Letter of the Week – “I’m still listening to the copy you sold me every few days, and loving it…”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin II

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I noticed that a Super Hot of Zep 2, and now a Nearly White Hot, both sold out within hours of you listing them, despite some jaw-dropping prices.

Meanwhile, I’m still listening to the copy you sold me every few days, and loving it at least as much as I did on the first play. I’m still wincing at the price, but also feeling very glad you reached out to me about it. So, thanks again.

Aaron

Aaron,

Just think how many times you will play that record in your lifetime. A few bucks a play, for an experience like that, what a bargain!

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Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto / Bruch – Scottish Fantasia – Campoli / Boult

More of the music of Max Bruch (1938-1920)

More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

  • This stunning London Blueback LP presents the complete Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with some of the best sound we have ever heard for the work 
  • The Mendelssohn on London (CS 6010) with Ricci is also excellent, but hard to find and expensive if you do
  • The Scottish Fantasy on side two contains some of the best sound we know for the work, close to our favorite, the Heifetz on Living Stereo (LSC 2603)
  • One of the truly great 1959 All Tube Kenneth Wilkinson “Decca Tree” recordings in Kingsway Hall, captured faithfully in all its beauty on this very disc
  • Referring to the Mendelssohn, Gramophon noted: “[Campoli’s] virtuosity in the finale are as self-evident as is the excellence of the accompaniment under Sir Adrian Boult. There are many felicitous touches and the distinguished soloist plays magnificently throughout.”
  • If you’re a fan of Campoli’s, this 1959 album belongs in your collection, along with quite a few others, if only we could fine them
  • The complete list of titles from 1959 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

As can be seen from the grades above, The Scottish Fantasy on side two was not remotely as good sounding as the Mendelssohn on side one. The best pressings for that work came on the London Stereo Treasury label surprisingly enough. As good as those later British pressings were, the best of which earned the full Three Pluses for its side two, none of them had quite the magic of the Mendelssohn found here. (more…)

Mingus’s Pre Bird Makes the Case For the Hot Stamper

More of the Music of Charles Mingus

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Charles Mingus

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he wrote recently for one of our favorite Mingus records, Pre-Bird.

Mingus’s PRE BIRD and THE CASE For the HOT STAMPER

A few quick thoughts on the album which which we hope will be of interest to our readers:

We used to think the early Limelight pressing shown here was so amazing sounding that finding better sound for this recording would simply be impossible, but the original Mercury showed us just how wrong we were – the right Mercury pressing takes the recording to another level, one we never imagined it could reach. (In our experience records do that from time to time. We’ve written about some of the ones we’ve played here.)

Here is a small excerpt from our most recent commentary for the album:

The best copies recreate a live studio space the size of which you will not believe (assuming your room can do a good job of recreating their room). (Here are some of the other recordings we’ve auditioned with exceptional amounts of size and space.

The sound is tonally correct, Tubey Magical and above all natural. The timbre of each and every instrument is right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it — so high-resolution too.

If you love ’50s and ’60s large group jazz you cannot go wrong here. Mingus was a genius and the original music on this record is just one more album supporting the undeniability of that fact.

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On Tarkus, Only the Brits Have the Tubey Magical Sound We Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

This killer copy features some of the more intense prog rock sound to hit our table in quite some time. This is a true Demo Disc LP, one of the most dynamic and powerful rock recordings ever made.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame, we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings will rattle the foundation of your house if you’re not careful. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense. It’s big Bombastic Prog that wants desperately to rock your world. At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly. At loud levels it actually does rock your world.

Unlike most British pressings of the first album, the Brits here really ROCK, with greater dynamic contrasts and seriously prodigious bass, some of the best ever committed to vinyl. This music needs real whomp down below and lots of jump factor to work its magic. These Brits are super-low distortion, with an open, sweet sound, especially up top, but they still manage to convey the awesome power of the music, no mean feat.

All but the best Brit pressings have a tendency to be a bit turgid and many of them lack the bottom end weight that music like this absolutely needs in order to work its magic. There are some good domestic copies — not in a league with the best Brits at all — but most of them have sub-generation sound that robs the instruments of their immediacy and texture (much the same way that Heavy Vinyl does, truth be told).

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