Month: September 2026

Oliver Nelson – Meet Oliver Nelson

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone

  • You’ll find INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades throughout this New Jazz recording pressed on fairly quiet OJC vinyl
  • A tough shootout, as no other copy earned a 3+ grade on either side, which simply means that when you find a top copy, it sets such a high standard that everything else ends up getting marked down
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, never dry, hard or transistory – true Demo Disc quality sound
  • There’s so much life in these grooves – the sonics jump out of the speakers right into your lap
  • 4 stars: “…this was an impressive beginning to a short but productive career and gives one a strong example of the multi-talented Nelson’s tenor playing.”

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Satie – Previn Conducts Satie and Music from France / LSO

More Classical and Orchestral Recordings

  • Here is a vintage RCA Red Seal import pressing (the first to ever hit the site) with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from first note to last
  • A tough shootout, as no other copy earned a 3+ grade on either side, which simply means that when you find a top copy, it sets such a high standard that everything else ends up getting marked down
  • It’s simply bigger, more transparent, less distorted, more three-dimensional and more real than practically all of what we played
  • Everything that we listen for in a great classical recording can be heard on this copy – it’s immediate, dynamic, very low distortion, spacious, and alive

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Doc Watson – Southbound

More Folk Revival Music

  • This vintage pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
  • We were specifically listening for richness, sweetness, warmth and intimacy on Doc’s vocals, and this pressing gave us all those qualities in abundance
  • 5 stars: “Southbound was a pivotal record for Doc Watson… it demonstrated that Watson was capable of more than just dazzling interpretations of folk songs, but that he could also write excellent original material and rework new country songs in a fascinating manner.”

Folks, if you made the mistake of buying the Cisco Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album that came out in the early 2000s, you are in for treat. Instead of Doc and his band mates playing from behind a thick curtain at the back of your sound room, they can now be heard where they should have been all along: front and center between your speakers!

The difference between a truly outstanding vintage pressing and a modern mockery of analog could not be more striking. (more…)

And Here I Thought The Mastering Lab Made Nothing But Good Sounding Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

We just did a shootout for Ambrosia’s One Eighty album, describing our Shootout Winning copy this way:

Analog at its Tubey Magical finest. You’ll never play a CD (or other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record no matter how long you live.  This is smooth, rich analog at its best, easy on the ears as we like to say.

But none of what we said about our best Hot Stamper pressings would apply to the copies with the stampers you see below.

One of the copies we played with JW1 stampers was good, not great, earning a barely-hot 1.5+ grade. 1.5+ is four grades down from the best. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording One Eighty can be on the best pressings.

The other pressing with those stampers did not qualify as a Hot Stamper at all. We would say it had passable sound, better than average but not really good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to.

Had it not been cleaned to make it quieter and improve its sound quality, it most likely would not have earned that single plus at all. In that respect it would have much in common with the kinds of LPs filling up the shelves of record collectors everywhere. Who needs another mediocre sounding record sitting on the shelf? And yet there they are.*

Our two best sounding copies were cut at The Mastering Lab and had exactly the same stampers. Like a lot of Warner Bros. records, JW (Jacksonville) pressings rarely sound as good as those pressed elsewhere. (You record experts out there will know what the other plants are.)

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Bashin’ Is a Difficult to Reproduce Jazz Masterpiece

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Jimmy Smith Available Now

In the past we’ve complained about “Rudy Van Gelder’s somewhat over the top echo-drenched brass,” but on a copy such as this there is nothing to complain about!

All that reverb on the brass sounds RIGHT. If you have a top quality front end (and the system that goes with it), this recording will be amazingly spacious, three-dimensional, transparent, dynamic, and open.

Copies of this album are sometimes so sour or dull (or both) that they go right in the trade pile. Add to that the difficulty of finding copies that are scratch-free and not too noisy and you have one tough shootout. Inner Groove Distortion caused by the non-anti-skate-equipped turntables of the day is a chronic problem with vintage jazz records, and this title is typically no exception — except in this case! 

A Must Own Jazz Record

This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious Jazz Collection.

It also ranks fairly high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.

Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems .

Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.

This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process.

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Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery – The Dynamic Duo

More of the Music of Jimmy Smith

More of the Music of Wes Montgomery

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, this is an wonderful sounding pressing of Jimmy and Wes’s classic jazz collaboration from 1966
  • Big, rich and lively, thanks to Oliver Nelson’s arrangements (and RVG’s engineering), this big group of top players is having a blast and we think you will too
  • 5 stars: “The romping, aggressive big band charts [represent] Oliver Nelson at his best… The results are incendiary — a near-ideal meeting of yin and yang… They are an amazing pair, complementing each other, driving each other, using their bop and blues taproots to fuse together a sound.”

The sound of this Verve stereo pressing is tonally correct and natural. The timbre of each and every instrument is right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it. So high-resolution too. If you love ’60s jazz you cannot go wrong here. (more…)

Elton John – Rock of the Westies

More Rock and Pop

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  • A vintage DJM import pressing with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to last
  • This copy rocks like crazy with serious weight down low, huge size and space, and plenty of driving energy
  • The best copies like this don’t get too congested in the choruses, a typical problem with the album
  • Best bets: “Medley (Yell Help, Wednesday Night, Ugly),” “Island Girl,” “Street Kids,” and “Hard Luck Story”
  • “Rock of the Westies appears in retrospect to be his last great rock album. It certainly does rock consistently harder than any other John album…” – Amazon

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Dave Mason – Alone Together (Marble Vinyl)

More of the Music of Dave Mason

  • Mason’s Masterpiece, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides of this vintage Blue Thumb pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Listen to how big and rich the dynamic chorus gets on the first track, “Only You Know and I Know” – what a thrill to hear it like that
  • A killer Bruce Botnick recording – Tubey Magical analog, smooth and natural, with the whole production sitting on a rock solid bottom-end foundation
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Alone Together represents Dave Mason at his peak… everything comes together perfectly.”

Before I get too far into the story of the sound, I want to say that this album appears to be criminally underrated as music nowadays, having fallen from favor with the passage of time.

It is a surely a Masterpiece that belongs in any rock collection worthy of the name. (Others that belong in that category can be found here.) Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s no filler here.

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“Un******believable that any record could sound that good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stamper pressings he purchased not long ago, one of which was the album you see pictured: America’s debut.

Hey Tom, 

I want to tell you I bought America’s 1st LP from you some couple of years back. White Hot designation at that time. I don’t know if you have found one better since then.

Paid big dollars and I still cannot believe the sound. Worth every penny. 

When I play that LP, I cannot avoid getting goose bumps or getting totally enveloped with the music. The guitars and vocals are flat out surreal.

It is just as amazing as the Eagles 1st LP Hot Stamper. Un******believable that any record could sound that good.

Bill 

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I know exactly what you mean. In 1971 or 1972, while still in high school, I got my first copy of America and it quickly became a record I could not get enough of. Only later would I learn from my friend Robert Pincus that it was a landmark pressing in the world of Hippie Folk Rock, a genre that makes up much of the music I listen to these days.

We’ve been promoting the idea that music does the driving for more years than I can remember. Much of what drove me was acoustic folk rock, the kind of music I fell in love with when Crosby, Stills and Nash released their first album in 1969. I credit many of those albums with helping me (later us) improve the quality of our playback.

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Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review for Workingman’s Dead was written shortly after the release of the album in 2003.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say?

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