Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now
UPDATE 2026
I wrote the commentary you see below way back in 2006. I wanted to give our customers an incentive to critically listen to the new Rhino pressing of Blue, a Heavy Vinyl reissue we actually gave out for free with every Hot Stamper of the album we sold.
We wanted our customers to try and answer the question I had posed in my review as to what aspect of the sound was improved in the new pressing, relative to the vintage copy they would have just purchased from us.
For those of you who have been reading our commentaries about modern remasterings, you know that rarely do we find any area of their sound that could be considered in any way “improved.”
As you will see from our commentary below, no less a personage than Michael Fremer had said at the time that the Rhino pressing “has far greater presence and physicality and is more immediate, dynamic, detailed and especially transparent.”
As hard as it may be to believe, I actually agreed with him about one of those qualities.
I’ve broken down his list below. If you have one of our Hot Stampers and the Rhino reissue, play them back to back and try to hear what is better about the reissue. Which of the following does it have more of compared to even the best vintage pressings?
- More presence,
- More physicality (whatever that is),
- More immediacy,
- More dynamics.
- More detail,
- More transparency
I had posed this question on the blog over the course of many years and never got anything approaching a serious answer.
I was going to reveal what quality I thought it was at some point, but I have since decided that it is better left for the reader to figure out for himself rather than have me tell him. What do you learn from being given an answer? Nothing, or next to nothing, so why do it?
Similarly, the Heavy Vinyl Led Zeppelin II and Brothers in Arms reissues are very good sounding records, with obvious shortcomings which I had hoped my readers would be able to spot and write to me about. None have to date, or at least none have told me what they are, which works out to be more or less the same thing.
I will have a great deal more to say on this subject down the road, one that is critically important for audiophiles regardless of their experience. For now let me leave you with what Steve Hoffman had to say about the work he did on Blue. (You can find the quote on Joni Mitchell’s website.)
This is a really wonderful album; Joni just laid it all out there for the world to hear. Brave, especially back in the day & I feel that this new version is the true giant killer.
Unlike the original 1970’s pressings, this new version was mastered without ANY added compression whatsoever, making it a true problem child in cutting (of our own making) but I wouldn’t have it any other way. After many spoiled lacquer masters and one too many Altoids, it was finished to everybody’s satisfaction.
The effort was worth it. The ebb and flow of the music is totally intact. Parts were cut, plated and pressed at Record Tech (RTI) and the actual 1971 Reprise master tape (as recorded and mixed at A&M Recording Studios) was used in disk cutting, bypassing the usual/”EQ’d and Compressed Cutting Master” completely.
Unlike the DCC, most of the songs on this vinyl version were cut without ANY equalization at all so this will be the closest you will ever be able to get to the sound of the true master tape of Blue. It was exciting to work on and I’m sure it will please y’all.
Steve Hoffman, mastering engineer
Our Commentary from 2006
A friend sent me a piece of Michael Fremer’s review of the Rhino 180 gram Blue, which I quote here:
…the reissue has far greater presence and physicality and is more immediate, dynamic, detailed and especially transparent. To their credit, Gray and Hoffman didn’t try to mess with the original’s intent. They’ve remained true to it while improving upon it in every way. Highest recommendation, and a most highly anticipated reissue that lives up to every high expectation.
I’m getting high just reading it!
I can tell you that only one of those nouns and adjectives (presence, physicality, immediate, dynamic, detailed, transparent) has anything to do with the reissue he is reviewing. If you know which one it is, please send me an email as to which one you think it is and where you hear its effects or qualities most clearly.
Of course, you are free to make a case for any and all of the words Fremer used. I’ve already said in Blue, The Game, that I don’t think it’s a very good idea to state my criticisms openly on the site. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mind hearing from other audiophiles as to its merits, or lack thereof.
A Blue Shootout
However, I must tell you about doing a Blue shootout at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.
But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise. My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.
Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.
The new one isn’t better; it’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.
The Average Audiophile System
Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fi system.
Figure twenty grand minimum as a budget. (It can be done for less but only if you have the skills to make it work, and those skills are hard to come by. They can’t be bought, which is why so many megabuck systems sound terrible. And if you’ve only budgeted a modest amount of money toward your system, it stands to reason that you’ve probably only budgeted a modest amount of time and effort into improving its reproduction.)
Hey, I’m living proof of how hard it is. I gave up on Blue, remember? The project that stalled? I didn’t have the equipment or the room I would have needed to crack that nut. That was in 2005, but it was pre Hallographs; Pre EAR 324P; Pre tons of room treatments and Pre about fifty other changes I’ve made to the system.
Here I was playing records all day every day, tweaking my stereo like crazy, trying all kinds of new equipment all the time, and even I found it too hard to make much headway with Blue.
So don’t feel bad if your copy of Blue on domestic vinyl sounds terrible at your house. It sounds terrible almost everywhere. It used to sound terrible here.
Most copies aren’t especially good to begin with, and most stereos aren’t up to playing the few copies that are any good. know now that my stereo can play Blue, beautifully. And in doing so it makes the new version sound positively sick in comparison.
So-Called Great Stereos
Audiophiles generally think they have great sounding stereos. I haven’t met too many that didn’t. But most of these so-called great sounding stereos utterly fall apart when confronted with Difficult to Reproduce material played at anything above a whisper. Those are precisely the kind of albums we love to crank up good and loud here at Better Records, albums like Ambrosia, Fragile, Pretzel Logic, and on and on. Got a Tough Nut like Blue? We say bring it on!
If your stereo is up to it, a good domestic copy of Blue will kill the new 180 gram reissue. And if the new Blue sounds as right to you as it does to Mr. Fremer, I have only one piece of advice: Get crackin’.
Further Reading