Hot Stamper Pressings of Live Jazz Club Recordings Available Now
This title is yet another audiophile hall of shame pressing. It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I had a less-than-revealing tube system in the 90s, but even that system, as limited as it was, would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful pressing.
The copy of the Classic I auditioned back in 1995 had Hawkin’s horn sounding squawky and sour.
Why does Rudy Van Gelder get called out for that sound but Bernie Grundman never does? It’s the same sound!
As a result of our thumbs down judgment, we made a point not to carry this title. We were selling lots of other Classic Records at the time of course. Looking back on those days from where we are now, to us that means that our standards were not very high. But we sure thought they were at the time.
It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.
If you don’t think the major audiophile labels had anything but contempt for their customers , play this pressing and see for yourself the kind of garbage they were happy to pawn off on the audiophile “community.”
Speaking of the audiophile community, was there ever such a thing?
There is now of course, Hoffman’s being the most popular. On his forum you will find self-described audiophiles defending the indefensible at every turn. I am happy to report that the threads mentioning — sorry, I meant to say bashing — Hot Stampers are some of the most popular.
I liked many of Classic’s other jazz titles — they did a better job with jazz than any other kind of music — but this was not their finest hour. Unless I got a bad copy, always a possibility.
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem impressed by.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see things the same way.