Hot Stamper Pressings of Excellent Jazz Recordings Available Now
If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, our best advice is to skip it. We found the sound to be much too dry and bright — think CD-like sound — for our tastes. Veiled too, lacking the resolution common to good vintage pressings.
We’ve never played an early pressing of the album, but we know a bad sounding record when we hear one, and this OJC is pretty bad.
It clearly lacks Tubey Magic as well as weight in the lower registers, and that is simply not a sound we can abide, whether it’s found on a cheap jazz reissue or a modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.
Same with Come Along With Me. The copy we played years ago had many of the same problems.
Our OJC Overview
We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings in the more than 37 years we’ve been in the record business.
Some OJC pressings have the potential to be great.
We’ve even found some of the more recent pressings on OJC that have good — not great mind you, but good — sound. (Just to be clear, any OJC produced this century is to our way of thinking a recent pressing.)
Some are we’ve played are just awful.
And the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually throwing one on the turntable and giving it a spin. If it shows promise, we buy a bunch more and see if we can find some good ones.
If the sound is hopeless, we don’t pursue it. We have way too many potentially good sounding records waiting to be played.
It’s a Lot of Work
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like going the extra mile, they draw faulty conclusions based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when evaluating pressings. They are quick to judge the whole series based on a few examples.
OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills!
Those who approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with what can only be described as 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 that proposition, for or against. None of them in our estimation seem to know much about the mysteries and arcana that lie at the heart of the vinyl LP.
The amateurish methods that 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.
Sadly, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the best explanation for the sorry state of audio these days, means they simply don’t know how little they know and therefore see no reason to doubt their high opinions of themselves, their equipment and their acumen.
Progress in audio is possible, but only if you know that you are not already at the top of the mountain. You should recognize that a lot of serious climbing remains to be done.
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 may have passable sound, but the music is too weak to be worthwhile. These are also records most audiophiles can safely avoid.
Further Reading