… far from the best we played, earning barely Hot Stamper grades.
And we would be remiss if we failed to point out that the proper cleaning of your records will typically improve their sound quality by at least one half plus, and more often than not one full plus.
It’s very likely that neither of the A3/B3 copies you see below would have qualified as Hot Stamper pressings without the aid of a good cleaning.
Red Clay is one of our favorite CTI albums – Red Clay (the song and the album) is Hubbard’s soul jazz Masterpiece, and it’s a record that belongs in every audiophile’s jazz collection.
Lenny White drums up a storm on this album – on this copy he is playing right in the room with you. If you’re a Hubbard fan, or perhaps a fan of early-70s soul jazz, this title from 1970 is surely a Must Own.
Although Rudy recorded and mastered the album — the only pressings that qualified for the shootout were his — it should be noted that Van Gelder in the dead wax is never a guarantee of high quality sound, on any record.
(It’s easy to criticize the bad pressings of Rudy Van Gelder’s work, but let us not lose site of the countless great ones.)
This A3/B3 pressing was not awful, or even mediocre — the reissues without VAN GELDER in the dead wax would most likely be much worse sounding — but at 1.5+ we would say it has earned good, not great Hot Stamper grades.
The only way to guarantee higher quality sound is to do a shootout with a good-sized pile of cleaned pressings and find the one with the best sound using the rigorous testing methodologies we use.
For this kind of work, top quality playback is a must.
There is of course a way to avoid doing all that work and spending all that money on piles of pressings, most of which you will eventually have no use for, and that’s to buy a Hot Stamper copy of the album from us.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Freddie Hubbard Available Now
Further Reading