Hot Stamper Pressings of Jethro Tull Albums Available Now
The concepts we discuss below were hashed over in a 2023 letter written to us about a video interview with Michael Fremer, a video, I confess, I’ve never watched.
For background purposes, you should know that Steve Westman and Michael Fremer really like Heavy Vinyl records. Because of this shared interest, they naturally get along well.
I was invited on Steve’s show for a couple of episodes myself, as was Robert Brook, but because neither I nor Robert care much for Heavy Vinyl pressings, we had little in common with Steve or his roundtable. There was no reason for either one of us to be there, and it is unlikely we will be invited back. What would we talk about? How bad the sound quality is on the new records you guys talk about endlessly to the exclusion of everything else? You can imagine what they thought of my views, and vice-versa.
Back to the letter. As I explained to my customer, making generalizations about records is rarely of much use. The devil is in the details. Let’s take a look at what Michael Fremer has written recently about originals.
In his review for the new Stand Up on Heavy Vinyl from Chad, he notes that it has great “transient clarity on top and bottom,” and the original has hyped-up mids and upper mids. This is because he is making the most obvious mistake any record collector could possibly make.
He thinks the original pressing is the standard against which the new pressing should be judged.
But this is out and out poppycock, the kind of conventional wisdom that newly-minted collectors might fall for, but only the most benighted enthusiasts would be likely to give much creedence to.
We discuss this myth here and in hundreds of reviews on the blog.
There are currently about 200 listings for reissues that beat the originals, compared to 1200 or so listings for records in which the early pressings — not necessarily first pressings, mind you, but the right early pressings — can be expected to win shootouts.
Stand Up is one of the titles we have found to be clearly superior on the right reissue. Folks, it’s not even close.
After cleaning and playing dozens of copies over the course of about twenty years, something that practically no individual audiophile would ever be able to do, we’ve heard our share of great sounding Stand Ups, as well as plenty of awful ones.
Fremer makes the common mistake of stopping with his one original. Thinking inside the box, he naturally comes up with the answer that is most likely under the circumstances — the wrong one.
It’s a mistake that few record collectors don’t make.
I should know, I was one of those niave collectors. Until my friend Robert Pincus came along thirty-odd years ago and clued me in, I had no idea that no two record pressings sound the same.
A big part of the fun of record collecting is learning about them, a subject to which I have devoted all of my adult life.
There is precious little learning going on when you buy an original and simply assume you now know what the album really sounds like.
This blog is practically dedicated to the proposition that nothing could be further from the truth.
And it’s astonishing to us that all the so-called experts — more correctly referred to on this blog as charlatans — so often fail to grasp these basic concepts, concepts that are at the heart of a true understanding of records and their properties.
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