Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now
We did a shootout for Black Byrd in 2025. We were fortunate to be able to include the Heavy Vinyl pressing that came out in 2002 along with the vintage pressings we had on hand.
The reissue was made back in the days when Rainbo Records was pressing records. (Scorpio carried a lot of Rainbo Records when I was still selling regular vinyl, and their pressings were often warped and defective, causing me to stop buying their releases.) Rainbo Records went under in 2011 (according to Discogs), not a moment too soon. They pressed mostly cheap junk vinyl aimed squarely at the lo-fi crowd.
But let’s get back to Black Byrd. Here is the way we described a Hot Stamper we put up on the site recently:
We played a bunch of these recently and only a few had the kind of sound we were looking for. This one was one of the best we heard — big, bold and lively with excellent presence. The bottom end is meaty and punchy, the highs are sweet and extended, and the mids sound right.
Most copies didn’t jump out of the speakers the way this one does. You’ll have a hard time finding such rich, smooth sound for this wonderful jazz album.
Some of these later pressings are just plain weak, but every now and then you find one like this that clearly benefits from the use of modern cutting equipment. The bass is tighter, the drums have more snap, and the soundfield has real depth. There’s excellent energy and good presence throughout, and the top end sounds just right.
Admittedly the above is fairly generic, but good records tend to do what good records always do, so why get specific? If you want to see in-depth notes for records that we’ve played in shootouts, we have a section full of them on the blog and you can be sure there are a great many more on their way if I have anything to say about it. (You can’t fire me — technically I still own the company.)
At around $30, all this Heavy Vinyl pressing would have to be is decent sounding. With a grade of 1+, it’s close, but just short of a cigar. Heavy Vinyl reissues of mediocre quality have their own section, mostly populated by the better releases on Speakers Corner, Cisco, Classic Records and others starting in the 90s.
We use the 1+ grade for vintage records that are passable, not good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper but not really a bad pressing either.
A mediocre grade puts it well ahead of the pack when you consider just how dreadful many of the releases we’ve played recently turned out to be.
(The Heavy Vinyl disasters section you see below has more than two hundred entries at this point, with many more on the way. As long as they keep making bad sounding remastered vinyl, we’ll keep publishing our notes, hopefully to help music lovers and audiophiles more easily recognize their shortcomings. Perhaps someday both groups will recognize what a waste of money these pressings are.)
We only played side two of this copy for some reason. It’s possible side one is better, but it may be worse, we honestly can’t say since we didn’t play it. Considering it was pressed by Rainbo Records, side one is unlikely to be any better.
Our notes read:
Side Two
Track Two
- No weight
- Pretty dry and a little hot
- Sort of transparent but thin voices and horns
- Not the worst Blue Note remaster we’ve played
And not our idea of good sound! We would never sell a record this badly lacking in weight, so dry, and with voices and horns that are this thin.
The sad reality of the modern remastered record is that at least some of the Blue Notes being made today are quite a bit worse sounding than this one. Even limiting ourselves to the few we’ve played has been a dispiriting exercise in how the good intentions of Tone Poets and Music Matters can go so horribly wrong.
Further Reading
Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 300 at this stage of the game in 2026.
Even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed somewhat with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we had never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are enamored with these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records have such bad sound that I was pissed off to the point of creating a special sh*t list for them. As of 2025, it contains close to 300 titles. That is a lot of bad sounding audiophile records! I should know, I played an awful lot of them.
Having now retired, I’m pleased to be able to leave that job in the more than capable hands of the listening crew at Better Records. They have been playing many of the newer releases and finding the sound is every bit as bad or worse these days.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.
This label design is one audiophiles looking for high quality records should best avoid.