This Is the Pressing They Chose to Be on The TAS List?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

We described one of the better OJC copies from our second-ever shootout for the Out There album this way:

This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, yet still super open and spacious.

Admittedly a bit generic, but good records tend to do pretty much all the same things well in our experience, so why complicate things?

Note that the best OJC pressings were dramatically better sounding than any of the earlier pressings we played, the ones mastered by Rudy Van Gelder.

At best the earlier stereo pressing was passable, and the mono original with the blue cover was just plain awful on side one (NFG) and passable on side two. Do you think the old school mono jazz collectors even noticed there was a world of difference between the two sides? I sure don’t.

But the 2016 remastered pressing (according to Discogs, we thought it was 2015 as you can see) puts them all to shame with ridiculously bad sound on side one, sound so bad we didn’t even bother to play side two. What would be the point? Whoever mastered this record was as clueless as they come, and then some.

The notes for side one read:

  • Very small, recessed and dry
  • Everything is over-textured (i.e., full of phony detail) and clean

Plenty of modern records suffer from these shortcomings. For some reason, the writers for The Absolute Sound didn’t seem bothered by them. They sure as hell bothered us though. Who in his right mind wants to listen to a record with sound this bad? This is a Super Disc? What the hell is super about it?

If you own this pressing, perhaps you would like to listen for the kinds of things we describe in order to recognize some of its many quite serious failings.

What on Earth Is Chad’s Problem?

Chad Kassem, the owner of the company that produced this crappy audiophile pressing, is clearly a guy who could be fooled by a cleaner, more-detailed sound.

If I were to try to figure out what stereo would play a record with that sound to its best advantage, I would say an old school overly-rich, slow, thick-sounding tube system would be the ideal match.

The tonality of his records over the years has been, to be extremely charitable, less than consistent. He doesn’t seem to be able to make up his mind which errors in tonality he prefers.

He used to like super-fat and tubey jazz records, and he hired Doug Sax and Steve Hoffman to make some of those for him.

For a while he liked records that sounded like MoFi’s, so he hired Stan Ricker to make some of those for him.

He hired Kevin Gray to make mediocrities like Quiet Kenny, and he hired George Marino to make a mess of Tea for the Tillerman.

If he’s hiring the best, as he likes to say he is, why all the second-rate and third-rate and just plain awful sounding records?

Why We Do It

In 2022 he hired Kevin Gray to recut this Eric Dolphy album, but we have no intention of finding out how bad it sounds. There are only so many hours in a day, and with so many amazing sounding vintage pressings waiting in the queue, why would we waste our time playing another bad sounding Analogue Productions repress?

We did this one for the benefit of the audiophile community, to help our fellow audiophiles understand just how incompetent the man who produces these records is, and that every penny spent on this crap is money down the drain. We feel we’ve done our duty when it comes to Out There.

Even better, we’ve made available to the record loving public amazingly good sounding pressings. They can help you get on a better path by showing you just how pathetic the sound is on these new Heavy Vinyl pressings compared to the best vintage pressings ever made, which are, of course, the ones we sell.

Further Reading

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