Out To Lunch on Liberty UA – “The Worst. So Metallic.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

In our review for the White Hot Stamper shootout winner of Out to Lunch we played in 2023, we wrote:

Out To Lunch is finally back on the site after a four year hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this early pressing.

Dolphy’s debut for Blue Note is an absolute knockout musically, and the quality of the sound on this pressing was everything we could have hoped for.

Both of these sides are amazingly transparent, with stunning immediacy and exceptional clarity – thanks, RVG!

Bobby Hutcherson murders on the vibes on this album – hearing his stellar, groundbreaking work played back on a Top Shelf (3+/3+) copy through a high-end stereo is nothing less than a thrill.

Turn this one up good and loud and revel in the glory that is Out To Lunch, the man’s Masterpiece, and a Must Own jazz album from 1964.

However, if you made the mistake of buying a Black and Blue Liberty UA label pressing, the one that came out in 1970, what you heard bears absolutely no resemblance to the glorious sound we describe above.

Black & light blue label with Blue Note 70’s logo in a square on left, Liberty UA. Inc., Los Angeles, California text on bottom. Runout is etched apart from “VAN GELDER” and “STEREO” that is stamped.

Yes, it may have been mastered by RVG himself, but it sure doesn’t sound much like the better pressings of the album we played in our shootout.

You might think that if Rudy recorded it, he should have known how to master it, so why pay the big bucks for the originals when the man himself was still cutting Blue Note pressings as late as 1970.

Seems like a good rule of thumb to follow, but in this case, it turns out to be a badly mistaken one.

Don’t be one of those audiophile record collectors who finds a copy of Out to Lunch with VAN GELDER in the dead wax and figures he has the pressing that sounds the way Rudy wanted it to sound. The UA pressing is no such thing. Rudy cut the record many times, and like most of us, he seems to have had good days and bad days.

His bad days, unfortunately, live on in the form of ridiculously bad sounding records such as this one.

Without a variety of pressings to play, how do you know which were made on good days and which were not?

This Is Why

This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

(In the case of Out to Lunch, doing shootouts helps you avoid some truly awful pressings that are on the market, and we’re not talking the undoubtedly crappy sounding version that Kevin Gray cut in 2021 for Blue Note, if his One Flight Up is anything to go by. We admit we’ve never played the record. Can you blame us? Is there anybody who can sit through sound like that?)

Fortunately for readers of this blog, our methods are explained in detail, free of charge.

We’ve also written quite a few commentaries to help audiophiles improve the way they think about records.

I implore everyone who wants to make progress in this hobby to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. There are 146 “we were wrong” listings on the site as of this writing, and we learned something from every damn one of them.

Further Reading

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