Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now
Warning: the record you see pictured is not the record we are discussing in this commentary.
Our shootout in 2024 involved all the most important Blue Note labels for this mystery title.
We don’t need to tell you that those early pressings take us years to find, and cost us a pretty penny — at least the ones that are in audiophile playing condition do — when we can even manage to get hold of them.
And we probably return at least half the ones we buy, doubling the trouble of getting a shootout going.
Some folks who produce Heavy Vinyl Blue Note reissues and some of those who review them will tell you that Rudy did not know how to master a record properly. They don’t think his pressings should sound very good to audiophiles, assuming the equipment these audiophiles own is of the highest quality, the way they assume theirs is.
Naturally we think audiophiles who believe any of the above are as wrong as wrong can be. And you can easily prove to yourself just how misguided they are simply by ordering one of our Hot Stamper pressings and playing it.
You can send it back — that’s up to you — but at least you will know how full of it these audiophile reviewers must be to write such nonsense. We love Rudy and make no bones about it. He is one of the All Time Greats.
Our notes for a recent shootout are shown below. There were six pressings in all, each of them mastered by RVG himself, which are the only ones with any hope of sounding good in our experiencee.
They came out exactly as the conventional record collecting wisdom would have predicted. The older the label was, the better the sound was.
Yes, it’s true: the best originals manage to take this mystery recording beyond what even the most serious audiophile enthusiast would ever think possible. The sound, in a word, is glorious.
Some audiophiles playing a reissue or two with RVG in the dead wax might come to the conclusion that he couldn’t cut the record well.
Those of us who clean and play piles of records know that nothing could be further from the truth. Even better, we have the shootout evidence to prove it, and we post it right here on the blog for all to see.
