Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cannonball Adderley Available Now
Soon after the album was released in 2000, we wrote the following short review (three words!) in our catalog:
“Outstanding! Top recommendation!”
Ten years or so later, we added this caveat:
A fairly good Speakers Corner jazz album. Hard to know what we would think of this pressing today, but for the thirty bucks you might pay for it, it’s probably worth a listen.
Well, we recently got one in and gave it that listen. Shockingly, it has held up fairly well for a Heavy Vinyl pressing.
With the mono switch out (inactive) on the EAR 324P, we noted:
Big, loose bass.
Horns are rich and nice but veiled.
With the mono switch in (active), the sound is a bit less veiled but not too different.
It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with a grade of 1.5+, it might qualify for our good, not great sounding LPs section, depending on how side two sounds. We didn’t play side two because 1.5+ is not a grade that makes us want to put any more time into it. It’s our lowest Hot Stamper grade, and it barely qualified for it, meaning there is a good chance that the next one could be 1+ and not worth anybody’s trouble.
The right vintage pressings are a big step up in class sonically, but boy are they hard to find in clean condition. We’ve tried for years and don’t have much to show for our efforts yet.
At a cheap price it’s not a bad record, depending on how you feel about the midrange being veiled.
I can’t stand that sound myself, but since a very large percentage of Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve auditioned over the years have suffered from that problem to one degree or another, I guess other music lovers and audiophiles feel differently. (This link will take you to some of the other records we’ve reviewed with veiled sound.)
The average copy on Discogs sells for $29.10. That seems like a decent price for a decent-sounding record.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 at this stage of the game in 2025.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still at least somewhat impressed with some of Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them. (Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records.)
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.