Testing Sibilance

For Our Sweet Baby James Shootout in 2008 We Had to Work Through 67 Copies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

UPDATE 2020

As you may have guessed from the title of this review, it was written in 2008, fairly early in our shootout history. We had been buying Sweet Baby James for decades, and by 2008 it was time to dive in to this classic from 1970, a landmark recording that single-handedly created a new genre, the singer songwriter album.

It took three days, sixty seven copies, and multiple rounds, but SWEET BABY JAMES HOT STAMPERS ARE HERE.

Both sides of this bad boy are DEMO QUALITY and ABSOLUTELY STUNNING. Add in the fact that the vinyl is unusually quiet and you’ve got one heck of a copy here.

It ain’t easy to find copies of this album with great sound on both sides and reasonably quiet surfaces — that’s why you haven’t seen more than one Hot copy hit the site since February 08. 

This was one of the most massive shootouts in Better Records history.

We started out with SIXTY SEVEN copies. After weeding out the copies with obvious condition problems and known second-rate stampers, we were left with three dozen copies to audition.

We battled through condition problems, bad stereo days [a thing of the past nowadays, thank god], and listener fatigue to end up with a select number of exceptional copies. 

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Listening in Depth to Songs in the Attic

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

Since the opening track of this record is one of the keys to knowing whether it’s mastered and pressed properly, once you get past the sibilance hurdle on track one, the next step is to find out how the challenges presented by the rest of the tracks are handled.

If you are interested in digging deeper, our listening in depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done shootouts for.

Side One

Miami 2017

This is usually the brightest cut on the first side, commonly found with some sibilance problems. On the high-res copies the sibilance is lessened, and the sound of the sibilance itself is much less transistory and spitty, with more of a silky quality, which is simply another way of saying it’s less distorted.

Of course one wouldn’t want the sibilance to be lessened by having a dull top end, but few of these pressings are dull. Most of them suffer from a brightness problem. The best copies keep the sibilance under control and balance the upper mids with extended highs. Without extension on the highs the sound will tend to be aggressive.

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How Do the Early Pressings of All or Nothing at All Sound?

More Billie Holiday

More Titles that Sound Best in Mono

I expected our amazing sounding original seen below to win the shootout, but it didn’t!

Also, the reprocessed fake stereo copy shown here is to be avoided at all costs.

It sounds as bad as any fake stereo record I can remember playing. What were they thinking?

Naturally, the highest quality vocal reproduction has to be the main focus on a Hot Stamper pressing for any Billie Holiday record we would offer. Her voice should be rich and tubey, yet clear, breathy and present.

In addition to being tonally correct and natural, the pressings we offer must also be highly resolving. With the right room and the right equipment, properly set-up and adjusted of course, you will hear everything that these vintage recordings have to offer, including the three-dimensional space of the studios in which the various sessions were recorded, under the auspices of Norman Granz.

The Sound of the Original

The original Trumpet Player Verve mono we had on hand to play suffered from an EQ problem we run into frequently in our shootouts for vintage vocal albums. Actually, to be clear, there were two main problems in the case of All or Nothing At All: a boosted midrange and occasional sibilance issues. (more…)