Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Wynton Kelly Available Now
Sometimes the 70s reissues of vintage jazz recordings that were made in the fifties, sometimes released with different covers similar to the one you see pictured, have excellent sound.
We know that for a fact because we’ve played some very good ones.
In the case of Kelly Blue, we felt we were obligated to play a few to make sure we were hearing as wide a range of different pressings as possible. We wanted to be sure we were hearing the best sounding pressings regardless of what era they were pressed in. (We’re very open minded that way.)
Here are our notes for the Black Label Riverside Stereo pressing with “1971” stampers:
- Thin,
- Dry,
- Honky,
- Veiled.
- Severe stereo spread. (Hard left and right, unmusical this way, players are disconnected.)
- Grade: 1+ on both sides
The other copy we had was even worse:
- NFG on side one, side two never played.
The Riverside originals we’ve played in the past, like a lot of other Riverside originals from the 50s, such as those by Thelonious Monk, were uniformly terrible.
And trying to find one in audiophile playing condition is as easy as it sounds.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 38 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.
If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are rarely better than mediocre, and some of them are just awful, with many of the newest releases being the most awful of them all!
Our Job Is to Find You Good Sounding Vinyl
That’s the reason we carry:
- Virtually no Heavy Vinyl repressings of any kind. (This one was done as a fluke a few years ago and since abandoned. The original plum label VICS pressings are the ones that win shootouts, not something pressed by Classic Records.)
- Just a handful of Half-Speed mastered titles, including one that was made by, can you believe it?, Mobile Fidelity.
- Rarely any Japanese pressings, and
- Nothing made in the 21st century from vintage tapes. (Well, almost. This one is coming to the site, eventually, and another is in the works,)
If these kinds of records sounded good compared to the vintage pressings we offer — in other words, if they performed well in shootouts — we would be happy to offer them to our customers.
But they almost never do.
How Did We Figure All of This Out?
There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?
Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.
If you want to learn about records, we recommend you do the same. You won’t be able to do more than one or two a week, but one or two a week is better than none, which is how many the average audiophile seems to want to do, based on my reading of the sites that they hang out on.
When it comes to finding the best sounding records ever made, our advice is simple. Play them the right way and pay attention to what they are trying to teach you. You will learn more with this approach than with any other.
