Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
A newer customer wrote to me years ago about the amazing sounding Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West that we’d sent him. He noted that his AP Heavy Vinyl pressing was “quite decent,” a characterization we found distressing.
Here is his original letter, along with some of what we wrote back. Newer comments and links have also been added.
As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.
Some things have changed since I wrote that screed many years ago. For example, we don’t find the sound of the OJC pressing of the album acceptable these days, a subject I plan to address before too long [and have yet to do].
The bottom line is this:
The Hot Stamper pressing of Way Out West you have now in your possession is the one that allows you to hear what that album is supposed to sound like.
Not the way Chad Kassem likes his records to sound: opaque, bloated, dull, smeary and compressed.
No, your White Hot Stamper has the brilliant sound that Roy DuNann recorded all those years ago, sounding, I believe, the way he wanted it to. This is of course only an opinion, but it is an opinion based on playing dozens of early Contemporary pressings and well as many vintage reissues that actually can beat them. Examples of both can be found here.
Somebody Needed to Figure It Out
All that was needed was for some group to come along who could properly clean a batch of vintage pressings, original or otherwise, play them, figure out what the best copies do that the average copy doesn’t, identify that best copy, and send it your way.
There was nobody who could do that kind of work in 1992, not even us.
It would be another 12 years before we managed to do our first official shootout, using a very different stereo and very different cleaning technologies, both immeasurably better than what we had to work with in the 90s.
Christian, if you have any AP records, or Heavy Vinyl from any other manufacturers, pull them off the shelf and play them. They won’t sound anything like the Hot Stamper pressings of 4 Way Street, Sketches of Spain and Way Out West we sent you. I’m guessing they won’t sound “quite decent” either.
Now that you know just how good the right vintage pressings can sound, those modern imposters are simply no longer going to be able to trick you. They were always a fraud and a scam — a passable-at-best product to be offered at what appeared to be an attractive price — now hopelessly outclassed in every way by the real thing, the real thing being a properly pressed, properly cleaned old record.
Further Reading
When I got started in audio in the early- to mid- ’70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:
- Stand-alone phono stages.
- Modern cabling and power cords.
- Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
- Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
- Carbon fiber mats for massive turntable platters.
- Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
- Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.
- And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.
A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level required to do our shootouts, and be confident about our findings, and we pursued every one of them about as far as time and money allowed.
For a further discussion of these issues, please click here.