Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
As a general rule, audiophiles should stick to stereo pressings of stereo recordings.
Case in point: The early stereo pressing of the album you see pictured to the left is an amazing Demo Disc quality jazz record.
Here is how we described a killer copy we found recently:
We play a lot of vintage Contemporary recordings, but this one surprised us right from the first track with sound that stands out — this on a label that produced many of our favorite standout recordings.
Both of these sides are clean, clear, and transparent, with an abundance of energy and wonderful clarity in the mids and highs.
This is not an easy record to come by, as evident by how long it took us to get our most recent shootout going, and they usually don’t sound anywhere near this good when you’re lucky enough to be able to track one down.
Mono Mistakes
However, do not make the mistake of thinking that any of these wonderful comments apply to the two mono pressings we played.
One was passable, earning our 1.5+ grade. It’s a nice enough sounding record I suppose. Smeary, hard and honky.
Of all the Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, only a handfull of the best of them would earn that grade or better. They would suffer from a different suite of problems, but they would be problems nonetheless. Some of our reviews for them can be found here.
1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That is a steep dropoff as far as we are concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Looking Ahead! can be on the best vintage pressings. (The OJC we played earned the same grade.)
More on the 1.5+ grade here. More on our grading scale here.
The other copy was worse and did not earn a sonic grade high enough for us to want to offer it to our customers. Flat, bright, smeary and hot are just unacceptable qualities for a vintage jazz record from the 50s, especially one on Contemporary, to have.
Leave the mono pressings for the jazz collectory types and their old school systems. Audiophiles should insist on stereo for this music.
To help guide you in your search for better sounding vinyl, here is our breakdown for mono versus stereo, as well as links to each category:
Currently there are about 125 albums in this group.
Currently there are about 550 albums in this group. (Note that records that are only available in stereo would typically not be included in this list.)
There are currently only 35 albums in this group. Some of them are mono pressings of stereo recordings, but there are not many of those. 99% or more of the stereo recordings we play sound better to us in stereo than they do in mono.
This is partly due to the fact that the big dynamic speakers we use are pulled well out into the room, where they have the ability to create a huge three-dimensional soundscape that stretches from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
Those of you with smaller systems, sometimes involving speakers too close to the back wall and even — gasp — right up against the back wall, will hear things differently. We can’t judge that sound since we have no way of actually hearing it, but it is unlikely we would find it acceptable.
Although there are more than three thousand reviews of albums on the blog, we don’t know how many came out when mono pressings of stereo recordings were still being offered (usually at a savings of one dollar, those were the days!), so identifying the best of the monos, stereos and those that sound good both ways is going to be a slow process that will take place over the course of many years.
Further Reading
- More personal favorite jazz albums
- More jazz albums we think we know well
- More stamper and pressing information (you’re welcome!)
