Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now
The best copies demonstrate the big-as-life Fred Plaut Columbia sound at its best (even better than Time Out in our opinion).
These vintage recordings are full-bodied, spacious, three-dimensional, rich, sweet and warm in the best tradition of an All Tube Analog recording.
If you want to hear big drums in a big room, these Brubeck recordings will show you that sound better than practically any records we know of.
The one standout track on this album for audiophiles is surely Unsquare Dance, with its uncannily real sounding handclaps in 7/4. The copies that did the best job of reproducing that “flesh on flesh” sound of actual human hands clapping scored very well in our shootout.
More to Listen For
For starters, listen for a fat snare and rich piano on the first track of side one. When you hear that, assuming you do, you should know you are in for a treat. Our best copies captured those two sounds brilliantly.
- More records that are good for testing the sound of the snare drum
- More records that are good for testing the sound of the piano
On the second track the clarity of the brushed snare is key to how resolving and transparent any copy is. The rich, smooth sound of Desmond’s sax balanced against the clarity of the brushes will help you make sure that the overall sound is tonally correct from top to bottom.
- More records that are good for testing transparency
- More records that are good for testing midrange tonality
On side two the first track has the Wall to Wall Big Drums in a Big Room sound that positively blows our minds. If you’re a fan of with jump out of the speakers sound, this is the album for you.
Note that in some places it sounds like the piano is overdriving its mic. We heard that sound on practically every copy we played, so we’re pretty sure it’s on the tape that way.
More Test Discs
We are in the process of making some lists (more lists!) for records we’ve found to be good for testing, tweaking and tuning your system, your room and your front end setup, among other things. You may want to check them out.
- Favorite jazz test discs
- Favorite orchestral test discs
- Favorite rock and pop test discs
- Still more of our favorite test discs
These are the records that challenged me and helped me to achieve more progress in audio. If you want to improve your stereo, these are some of the best records we know of to help get you to the next level.
Recording Time Further Out
(Emphasis added by me.)
Mark Wilder was interviewed about the recording of these Fred Plaut sessions..
Fred Plaut and Frank Laico were two of Brubeck’s recording engineers. Plaut is a true balance engineer; he’s my idol. I don’t know how he could pull off what he did in three hours.
He continued:
It’s amazing how well-recorded the group was back then. The sound is so three-dimensional, bigger than life.
Yet it’s amazing how little the engineers did to get that sound. They just put one mic a few feet from each instrument, and mixed live to 3-track—for left, center, and right. Then they edited the tape and mixed down to 2-track.
The old stuff sounds better than what we’re doing now.
We’ve been going in the wrong direction sound-wise for many years. The layout of the stereo stage was more realistic then, too. Drums were on the left, piano on the right, sax and bass in the middle.
It’s easy to hear what each musician was playing because they were separated spatially. These days, you hear each instrument in stereo, on top of each other. The drums spread all the way between the speakers, and so does the piano.
In one Brubeck recording (Castilian Drums, not on this set), the stereo perspective changes radically within the recording. It starts with drums hard left and piano hard right. But when the drum solo starts, there’s an edit and suddenly you hear the drum set spread out in stereo.
At the end of the solo, you’re back to drums left and piano right. These effects are on Brubeck’s albums Countdown (Columbia CS 8575) and Time Further Out (Columbia CS 8490).
Further Reading