Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now
We played an early Blue Label Prestige mono pressing of Standard Coltrane that was thankfully not as awful as the original Yellow Label mono we played, but it wasn’t very good either.
We characterize a record that earns one plus on both sides as having passable sound.
Which means you could listen to it, maybe even enjoy it for the most part, but you would have no idea just how well Rudy Van Gelder recorded the sessions in 1958 that went into the making of the album, which as you know was not compiled for release until 1962.
As you can see from the notes above, it was crude, smeary and thick. We try to avoid selling records with those faults, but sometimes you do the best you can and you still end up with records that have those shortcomings to some degree.
But if you know what to look for, and you know how to clean records and do shootouts, you know that there are great sounding pressings of this album. You just have to do the work it takes to find them.
I can’t say that most modern remastered records are crude, although some of them are, but a great many we’ve played are smeary, and almost all of them are thick — that is, lacking in transparency.
That last quality — a lack of transparency — may be the most irritating of all, a subject we discuss here.
(A great many records we’ve auditioned over the years are good for testing transparency. Those wanting to improve this aspect of their playback should consider making use of them.)
For this music, we’ve found the best sound on the better Two-Fer pressings and the right OJC.
Helpful Advice
This link will take you to more records with crude sound, best avoided by audiophiles looking for higher quality pressings.
Here are some we’ve found to have smeary sound and here are some that are thick.
As for records that, like this one, lack transparency, you can find about 50 that we’ve written about on the blog.
Further Reading
- Should you collect original pressings on Lush Life?
- Kevin Gray returns to the scene of the crime for One Flight Up
- These stereo recordings sound terrible in mono — no surprise there
There are a lot of good sounding records on the Prestige Blue Label. This just doesn’t happen to be one of them.