Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
A Must Own album from Horace Silver, with the kind of sound that only the best vintage pressings can offer.
If you don’t know the man’s music, this is a good place to start. It’s yet another triumph for engineering maestro Rudy Van Gelder – he refined a “live-in-the-studio” jazz sound that’s still fresh today, even after 65 years.
The really good RVG pressings (often on the later labels) sound shockingly close to live music — uncompressed, present, full of energy, with the instruments clearly located on a wide and often deep soundstage, surrounded by the natural space and cool air of his New Jersey studio.
As our stereo has improved, and we’ve found better pressings and learned how to clean them better, his “you-are-there” live jazz sound has come to impress us more and more. (I hope everyone can read the scribble on our Hot Stamper post-it notes by now. If there is any line you need translated, please feel free to let me know.)
You know what’s unusual about these notes?
They’re the kind of notes we’ve never written for any Heavy Vinyl reissue, even for the one that won our shootout not long ago.
They are the kind of notes that make it clear to us what a sham the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing tends to be, even those that are done right.
No modern record we’ve ever played has ever had anything even approaching this kind of big as life sound, and we doubt one ever will.
Records like this vintage vinyl pressing are thrilling in a way that very, very few records ever are.
Surprisingly, many of the most thrilling records we’ve ever played came from the same decade this record came from: the 60s.
Once you hear sound like this, you are not likely to forget it.
It sets a standard that modern remastered records simply cannot meet.
Further Reading