A List of Potentially Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings
A List of Probably Not Very Good Sounding OJC Pressings
It has finally come to pass. A modern pressing has won a shootout.
Having auditioned more than a dozen modern (post-2000) OJC pressings and having had them fall short of the mark again and again — when they weren’t just plain awful — we have now discovered one that can win a shootout.
As you imagine, this came as quite a shock.
We weren’t sure precisely which of the many OJC pressings our shootout winner was until we looked up the stamper numbers on Discogs. To our surprise, it had clearly been made sometime in the the 21st century.
This has never happened before. No record made since 2000 has ever won a shootout. Modern records range from awful to very good, but one quality they have never had is the ability to win a shootout, to be the best of the best.
Now one has.
There were a few of this modern pressing in the shootout. Some sides earned 2+ grades, some sides were 3+ winners.
The older OJC pressings we used to like earned grades ranging from 2+ to NFG. Most copies were 1.5+ or 1+, quite a bit less impressive than we would have thought. That’s what shootouts are for, to see how things stand now, after all the improvements that have been made to our playback and room. The last shootout would not have taken place in our new studio; perhaps that’s the reason the old OJCs are not doing as well. We have a big room with a high ceiling and we want the sound of the record to fill it. This sets a higher bar that not every record we used to like can clear.
Our Little Secret
For now, we are keeping the title a secret. Our investigations are continuing.
We had liked the 80s OJC on this title right from the start many years ago. We’d done the shootout since then a number of times. Last year, when we dropped the needle on one of the newer pressings we had acquired, we recognized the potential for very good sound, which is true for about one or two out of ten of the newly remastered OJC pressings put out by Concord.
Onto the backroom shelf it went until we could acquire more OJC copies of the album, and now we knew we could pick up whatever we found, whether pressed in the 80s by Fantasy or the 2000s by Concord.
The ones that had previously won our shootouts were pressed in the 80s. We keep of the stampers that did well from all our shootouts, and they matched the 80s OJCs.
More to come so stay tuned.
The search for perfect sound goes on!
Further Reading
- More jazz albums we’ve gotten to know
- More jazz albums that are personal favorites
- Hi-Fi beats My-Fi if you are at all serious about audio
