Hot Stamper Pressings of Miles’s Albums Available Now
Listen to the trumpet at the start of Freddie Freeloader. Most copies do not fully convey the transient information of Miles’ horn, causing it to have an easily recognizable quality we talk about all the time on the site: smear.
No two pressings will have precisely the same amount of smear on his trumpet, so look for the least smeary copy that does everything else right too.
Meaning simply that smear is important, but not all-important.
- Here are more recordings that are good for testing smear.
- Here are some records with a tendency to have smeary sound
If you click on the above link, you will see that we regularly talk about smeary brass instruments, smeary violins and smeary Classic Records classical reissues.
Pianos are good for testing smear simply because it’s easy to hear when the individual notes blur together.
Nobody else seems too bothered by smear, and one of our many theories about the stereo shortcomings of reviewers and audiophiles in general is that their systems are fairly smeary, so a little extra smear is mostly inaudible to them.
I had a smeary system for my first twenty or more years in audio, so I know whereof I speak.
Our present system has virtually no smear. Any smear we hear on a record is on the record, not in our system.
Any system with vintage tubes — whatever their pros and cons — will have at least some smear. We got rid of our tube equipment a long time ago. Since many of you who are reading this use tubes somewhere in your systems, you may find these commentaries on tubes in audio of interest.
Back to our listening tests:
On track one, side two, the drums in the right channel are key to evaluating the sound of the better copies. The snare should sound solid and fat — like a real snare — and if there is space in the recording on your copy you will have no trouble hearing the room around the kit.
The Giants Who Created Kind of Blue
- Bass – Paul Chambers
- Drums – Jimmy Cobb
- Piano – Bill Evans
- Piano – Wynton Kelly
- Tenor Saxophone – John Coltrane
- Alto Saxophone – Cannonball Adderley
Further Reading
- Reviews and commentaries for Kind of Blue
- More Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts
- Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments
We will be discussing the faults of the MoFi 45 RPM 2 LP set down the road, but the drums on that record are so wrong it all but beggars belief.
But we can find no evidence that he can hear anything, much less smear. It appears to us that smear is only one problem he has yet to solve among a number of others.