Our most recent Shootout Winner was a very special copy indeed:
A wonderful copy of JT’s classic followup to Sweet Baby James with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides.
This early Green Label pressing demonstrates the Tubey Magical midrange that modern records almost never reproduce. The sound of most of the tracks on the better pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed.
The only pressings we put in shootouts these days are cut at Artisan, on transistor equipment we should note, but the kind of transistor gear that, to the best of our knowledge, no longer exists — the kind that transforms the Tubey Magic found on the tape into Tubey Magical grooves on the record.
Bernie Grundman used to have equipment like that back in 1971. The evidence is there for all to hear on records like this one. Oddly enough the two titles have remarkably similiar qualities.
But not all Artisan cuttings are equal, as our stamper sheet from the shootout makes clear.
-1/-1 earned 1.5+ Hot Stamper grades, which means the sound is good, not great.
1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Mudslide Slim can be on the best vintage Green Label Artisan-cut pressings. (For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.)
1B/1C, the worst pressing from our shootout, is what we would consider passable. It’s not a bad sounding record, but it’s not good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper.
The world is full of records that sound like the 1B/1C cutting of Mud Slide.
Oh, But It Gets Worse
Worse, all the reissues we’ve played that were not cut by Artisan were quite a bit worse sounding, and there are tons of those around on The Burbank and later WB labels. (Forget the imports too, no matter how original.) As a matter of fact I am willing to bet they make up the bulk of most large record collections.
And if you just happen to be the proud owner of such a collection, how can you possibly find the time to play more than a small fraction of the records you own in any given year to determine which ones are good and which ones aren’t?
Or over the course of a decade, for that matter. The reality is that you can’t. (You could start by tossing any later label Mud Slide Slim pressing you own, but that won’t get you very far, obviously.)
As far as you know, all your records sound great! No need to buy another copy of [whatever title you care to name]. You haven’t played it in twenty years and don’t plan to for another twenty.
You didn’t care for the album on the lousy pressing you had, so you stopped playing it and just left it stored on the shelf for posterity. But posterity won’t care for the sound of it either.
Here’s hoping your kids like old records because they are going to end up with an awful lot of them.
Further Reading