Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Baker Available Now
For our first Hot Stamper Shootout Winner, we noted:
Both sides here are Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’ve never heard the record sound better than in our most recent shootout, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing the album since it was first reissued in the 80s.
I used to sell these very records in the 90s — we retailed them for ten bucks back then — but we had no clue just how good they could be back in those days. We couldn’t clean them right, or even play them right, and it would never have occurred to us to listen to a big pile of them one after another in order to pick out the best sounding copies.
This is a wonderful Chet Baker record that doesn’t seem to be getting the respect it deserves in the wider jazz world. You may just like it every bit as much as the Chet album, and that is one helluva record to compare any album to. In our estimation it’s about as good as it get.
Shootouts
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.
OJC Overview
Some OJC pressings are great — even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like to do that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.
Those who approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lacks of seriousness can be found on every audiophile forum there is. The youtubers are the worst, but are the self-identified aristocrats of audio any better? I see no evidence to support such a proposition and mountains to refute the very idea of it.
The methods these folks have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about facing that inconvenient truth.