Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now
For a Hot Stamper pressing we put up recently, we noted:
Moon Beams is one of the best sounding Bill Evans records we’ve ever played. You can see why we chose it to be the first OJC Hot Stamper of his work to hit the site back in 2015. Play “It Might As Well Be Spring” for the kind of sublime musical experience you only find on 20th century analog recordings.
All of that is true for the best of the 20th century pressings we played. (Which, by the way, does not include any originals as those are consistently inferior to the later pressings we’ve auditioned.)
As for the 21st century, the sound of the best 2002 pressings on OJC are somewhat opaque and dry compared to the best that came before. This is something we rarely point out in the listings we have on sale on the site. You generally have to come to the blog to get a fuller picture of the specific shortcomings we might have of some of our Hot Stamper pressings.
We know both dry sound and opaque sound well, having played hundreds of pressings that suffer from such conditions.
The sound may be decent on most of these 2002 pressings, and fairly good on the best of them, but that’s not really what we were hoping to find. We spent a lot of money and we spent a lot of time, to quote a famous line by a famous rock band, but the six 2002 pressings we cleaned and played nevertheless came up a bit short. That’s just how it goes sometimes. (And sometimes it goes completely off the tracks.)
The way we approach a shootout such as this typically involves playing a copy or two some pressing, the 2002 OJC in this case, and hearing sound good enough to make us think it might have the potential for greatness. As you can see by the marks we gave out, the average copy earned a grade of 1.5+, which is a good, not great Hot Stamper grade. Greatness was just not in the cards.
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.
