Hot Stamper Pressings of Outstanding Jazz Recordings Available Now
If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, best skip it.
The sound is dry and bright. It’s passable, but it’s certainly not very good, and probably the CD is better, assuming you are willing to go through a number of discs until you find one that is mastered properly.
To help you avoid records with this kind of sound, we have linked to others with similar problems on the blog.
Here are some of the titles we’ve found that tend to have dry sound and here are some that tend to have bright sound.
We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in the record business. Here are reviews for some of the ones we’ve auditioned to date:
- These are some of the potentially good sounding OJC pressings we’ve played
- These are most likely not very good sounding OJC pressings (but you never know!)
Original Jazz Classics
Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones. Some are awful. And the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.
Those who approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lack of seriousness can be found on every audiophile forum there is. The youtubers are the worst, but are the self-identified aristocrats of audio any better? I see no evidence to support the proposition for or against. None of them seem to know what they are talking about.
The methods that all of these folks have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about learning that inconvenient truth.
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound.
Some of these records may have passable sound but the music is too weak to be worthwhile. These are also records you can safely avoid.
Further Reading
- Collecting better sounding records
- To find better sounding records, neglect your beautiful ideas
- First get good sound – then you can recognize and acquire good records
