Warning: the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this commentary.
For this mystery title our recent shootout involved two early New York Blue Note pressings.
We don’t need to tell you that those are the ones that take us years to find, and cost us a pretty penny (in audiophile playing condition) when we do find them.
One of them we’ve had on the shelf for years to use as a reference pressing. We knew it could be beaten, that it would never be able to win a shootout, but we also knew it had a lot of the qualities we were looking for on the album.
Our Hot Stamper pressings are guaranteed to soundly beat (ahem) whichever versions of the album have been recommended by any of the self-described audiophile “experts” or your money back.
When those who produce Blue Note reissues and those who review them tell you Rudy did not know how to cut a record that sounds right on good equipment, you can easily prove to yourself how hard of hearing these people must be by simply buying one of our Hot Stamper pressings.
You can send it back — that’s up to you — but at least you will know how full of it these audiophile reviewers must be to write such nonsense. We love Rudy and make no bones about it.
Our notes for both early pressings are shown below.
Top copy:
This New York label pressing is very sweet and open. It lacks some warmth and depth in the midrange.
Lower copy:
This one is very tubey, big and bold, but it gets hot on the horns and needs space.
The best reissues manage to take the recording beyond what even the most serious audiophile enthusiast would be likely to think possible.
As you may have seen elsewhere on the site:
It just goes to show: No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them, you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.
Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of records. That’s why you must do shootouts.
Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us) you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances where you just got lucky. In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort and money, typically a great deal of both.
Don’t get us wrong: The odds are still very much with you when you buy originals, or, if not originals, at least very early pressings.
There are currently about 175 listings for reissues that beat the originals, compared to 900 or so listings for records in which the early pressings — not necessarily the first pressings, but the right early pressings — can be expected to win shootouts.
The one way you can be sure you will have almost no chance of scoring a win for any given album is by buying something made in the modern era and pressed on Heavy Vinyl.
Further Reading