For good music? We will leave that judgment to you. Music is personal. What moves me in music and what moves you in music may be related but they are surely not identical.
In 1959 Eddie Lockjaw Davis & Shirley Scott recorded an album for Prestige and they called it “Jaws.”
The sound of the vintage pressing we played was not very good, with hard panning to the left and right. It was also dry and had too much reverb.
We were playing an early stereo copy, mastered by Van Gelder, but I honestly cannot remember the label.
Maybe the mono is better? It would not surprise me. If we see a mono pressing for cheap we will probably pick it up and give it a spin.
If you’re a fan of either of these two fine players, you might want to do the same. I believe we played the OJC pressing years ago and were not impressed, so best to skip that one too.
What we can say is that any album with sound as weak as the pressing we played leads us to believe that finding top quality sound is too unlikely for us to pursue the album further. Maybe at a bargain price, but vintage jazz records are rarely found for cheap these days. Best to move on.
Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable, but the music is weak. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an audiophile record hall of shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles with claims of superior sound. If you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the misfortune to play.
We routinely put them in our Hot Stamper shootouts, head to head with the vintage records we offer. We are often more than a little surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
If you own any of these so-called audiophile pressings, let us send you one of our Hot Stamper LPs so that you can hear it for yourself in your own home, on your own system. Every one of our records is guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.