Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
UPDATE 2025
A new shootout for this title gave us a better understanding of the OJC relative to the other pressings we were playing. We came across one fairly good sounding OJC pressing out of the three we played, one that earned grades of 2+/1.5+, so if you have an OJC, play it and see whether it is one of the good ones or, as is most likely the case, one of the bad ones.
Side two is the side to play to hear what we are on about. The grades ranged from decent, 1.5+, to just awful, NFG.
The sound of the early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound that we played recently were not to our liking.
They are brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.
That is decidedly not our sound.
We have to admit that we used to find the sound of many of these OJC pressings much more tolerable in the past.
More than tolerable. Enjoyable. Recommendable. Saleable even.
Nothing to be ashamed of, that was many years ago. As you may already know, live and learn is our motto. Getting it wrong is a feature, not a bug, of collecting if your goal is to find the best sounding pressings of the music you love.
(If you have some other goal, this may not be the right blog for you. Definitely steer clear of this website. The prices there are ridiculous!)
It’s true: Our old system from the 80s and 90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one.
That was thirty or more years ago. Pretty much every dynamic speaker system I ran into had that sound. And I was never a fan of screens or horns. Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great. It sure sounded right to me at the time.
And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve substantially better sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutions in audio had not yet come to pass. It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.
Overview
Some OJC pressings are great — 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 fail to approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lacks 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 such a proposition.
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 coming to grips with that inconvenient truth.
Reviews R Us
We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings. Reviews for many of the ones we’ve auditioned are linked below.
To be fair, we may have only had one copy of some of the OJC pressings we reviewed. Perhaps another copy would have sounded better, but we are so familiar with the sonic shortcomings of this series that one bad sounding copy was all we cared to bother with.
It would be hard to justify the time and expense of chasing after records that are unlikely to be much better than the copy we already know to have bad sound. That’s just the reality of the record business. There are so many good records that need auditioning, why bother with the second- and third-rate ones? (We’ve actually played less than 1% of all the newer Heavy Vinyl reissues for the same reason.)
At least Fantasy had an excuse for making records that don’t sound good: they were cheap.
Further Reading