Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby we took the opportunity to play the 2023 Craft pressing cut by Kevin Gray.

It seems to have a nice list of features, among them AAA mastering using the Original Master Tape.

What could go wrong?

• Craft Original Jazz Classics Series
• 180g Vinyl LP
• (AAA) Lacquers Cut from the Original Tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio
• Pressed at RTI
• Tip-On Jacket with OBI

Plenty could go wrong, and did, especially on side two.

Nice features apparently are not enough to make a good sounding record.

Below are our listening notes cataloging the problems with this remastered pressing. If you own this version of the album, listen for the shortcomings we describe. The better your stereo and room, the more obvious they will be.

And of course the opposite is true for those of you who have trouble hearing them.

Now, if you already bought this sorry excuse for an audiophile pressing and just like collecting records, and don’t really care what they sound like, you can stop reading right here, put the record on and just enjoy the music.

Side One

• Good size
• Rich bass and piano
• Some smear and it’s opaque
• Hard and no real space
• and big bass plucks are hot

Side Two

• This is worse than side one
• Not very rich
• Brighter cymbals and piano yet lacking transients and detail
• Flat

Do you really want a record with these sonic faults?

Worse, can you imagine spending the kind of bread they charge and getting sent a record with these problems?

One thing that you may notice in these notes is that as we listened, the shortcomings become more and more obvious. This is often the case. The longer you play these new pressings, the worse they sound. In a recent review for a Mobile Fidelity pressing, we summarized the side with “sucks more with each listen,” which we think captures the experience of playing iy nicely.

We still have no idea how this company is still in business. Then again, this guy is still in business and doing better than ever, so the one thing that seems to have no bearing on the success of these two enterprises is the quality of the pressings they release.

They’re basically selling a product with no active ingredients. It then becomes the job of the marketing department to convince buyers that it’s the perfect cure for whatever ails them. And sales are very, very good — further proof, as if any were needed, of P.T. Barnum’s famous dictum about suckers. Make no mistake, these two companies were born to take your money.

How Bad Is It?

The 1+ grade on side one is our way of saying you could do worse. The NFG grade on side two means side two is hopelessly bad and must be considered a complete failure.

This side one has what we refer to as pass/not-yet sound quality.

Some records are so badly lacking in qualities critically important to their sound — qualities which are typically found in abundance on the best vintage pressings — that the promoters and defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly.

These records may not be awful, but they certainly aren’t very good. Audiophiles paying premium prices for them are clearly overpaying for shoddy merchandise.

We call these records pass/not-yet, implying that the supporters of these mediocrities are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope. If they target their resources (time and money) well, there is no reason they can’t get to where they need to be, the same way we did. (Our audio advice section may be of help in that regard.)

Tea for the Tillerman on the new 45 may be substandard in every way, but it is not a pass/not-yet pressing. It lacks one thing above all others, Tubey Magic, so if your system has an abundance of that quality, as many tube systems do, the new pressing may be quite listenable and enjoyable. Those whose systems can play the record and not notice this important shortcoming are not exactly failing. They most likely have a system that is heavily colored and not very revealing, but it is a system that is probably not completely hopeless.

A system that can play the MoFi pressing of Aja without revealing to the listener how wrong it is is on another level of bad entirely, and that is what would qualify it as a failing system. My system in the 80s played that record just fine. Looking back on it now, I realize that both my system and the record were doing more wrong than right.

We were still selling Heavy Vinyl when this awful Neil Young album came out in 2005, but two years later we had had enough of the sonically-challenged titles that were being pumped into the market.

It was then that we decided to focus all our energies on finding good vintage vinyl for our audiophile customers. We’re sure weren’t going to be selling the Heavy Vinyl trash these companies were hell-bent on making.

In 2007 we asked a question that as far as we know has never been answered satisfactorily by the audiophile public: why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?

We Can Help

If you are stuck in a Heavy Vinyl rut, we can help you get out of it. We did precisely that for these folks, and we can do it for you.

The best way out of your predicament is to hear how mediocre these modern records sound by comparing them to the vintage Hot Stampers we offer. Some of the letters customers wrote us about their experiences doing just that.

Once you hear the difference on your own stereo with your own ears, your days of buying newly remastered releases will most likely be over.

Even if our pricey curated pressings are too dear, as Paul McCartney famously sang, you can avail yourself of the methods we describe to find and clean killer records on your own.