Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now
UPDATE 2026
We first wrote about the superiority of the reissues of this wonderful Basie album about twenty years ago.
The original pressings of Basie Plays Hefti are the best, right?
Not in our experience. In this case it’s just more mistaken audiophile thinking.
Basie was recording like a madman back in the late ’50s and even all through the ’60s. In 1958, the year of this release, he put out seven (7!) albums on the Roulette label. We’ve played quite a number of them over the years and found relatively few with audiophile quality sound.
Including the original Roulette pressing of this very title. We’ve only heard a few, and had only one for our shootout, but it was awful enough to make us swear off buying more, especially considering the prices vintage jazz albums are going for these days.
Hard and sour brass, no real top or bottom, it’s the sound of a poorly mastered Old Jazz Record, fine for the consoles of the day, not so good on today’s advanced stereo systems. Emus seems to be the only way to go.
And of course we absolutely loved the music. I had a chance to see the Basie Big Band perform not long ago at Disney Hall and a fairly large chunk of the music and arrangements they play these days are Neal’s, practically half I would venture to guess. Meaning simply that Hefti’s music has clearly stood the test of time. Play this album and you’re sure to see what I mean.
Decades ago, our intuition that the originals would sound the best was incorrect. The experiments we subsequently carried out falsified that prediction.
In the audiophile record collecting world, intuitions have a bad track record, but more than a few audiophiles — many of whom are addicted to sharing their “record knowledge” on audiophile forums and youtube channels — seem unaware of this fact.
Taking a page from one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, we’ve opted to use a more scientific approach to discovering the best sounding record pressings, and we encourage you to do likewise.
We pioneered the evidence-based approach to finding the best sounding pressings, and, like all good scientists, we shared it with everyone. Some in the audiophile community have taken it to heart, but most have chosen to put their faith in reviewers, forum posters, common sense and logic.
None of these produce consistently good results, but those who use these methods are loathe to doubt them and only rarely if ever learn the error of their ways.
Once a decision has been made and a specific pressing acquired — you could call it door number three I suppose — cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias immediately kick in to justify the result, and soon enough the game is over. The prize has been won. It’s the best prize ever. It does everything right, everything you’d hoped for.
But the best sounding copy of the record was not behind door number three.
You don’t have the best sounding pressing (well, you might, but if you did it would be entirely the result of chance, since you have no experimental evidence), but as long as you think you do, and, like most audiophiles, you play records only for yourself, and purely for enjoyment, you have no way of discovering where on the spectrum of best to worst your record sits.
As long as you think you have the best, you have the best. How could there ever be any evidence offered to the contrary?
Making an effort to prove yourself wrong is surely the key to making progress in this hobby. Nothing will do more to improve the quality of your record collection, of that there can be no doubt.
Further Reading