Columbia/Epic – Selections

Select commentaries and reviews for Columbia/Epic

Motown Still Had It in 1982

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Marvin Gaye Available Now

With two superb Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this Midnight Love is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “round and punchy”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”good size and weight”…”spacious and relaxed percussion and vox”…”top detail” (side two).

Our post-it notes tell the album’s story. (By the way, if you like reading our post-it notes, we’re putting more and more of them on the blog these days. We talk about the importance of taking notes as part of the shootout advice we share. This post will help you with the basics.)

Drop the needle on “Sexual Healing,” then sit back and relax as the rich, warm sound of analog sets the mood!

There’s good frequency extension up top and down low, with plenty of meaty bass and silky highs (check out those bells).

This copy has two qualities which are essential for this music to really work its soulful magic: silky vocals and a BIG meaty bottom end.

Check out all the texture to the synths on Turn On Some Music – this is a highly resolving pressing which takes Marvin Gaye’s music — the last he would make before his death — to another level.

Many copies of Midnight Love suffer from a phony hi-fi-ish quality, sacrificing much of the warmth that is the all-important hallmark of analog. Is that any way to listen to this great Soul Classic? (My sources say no.)

Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our Hot Stamper shootouts.

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How Do the Columbia Special Products Reissues Sound on Mingus Dynasty?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

In general it is best to avoid pressings with the round sticker you see to the left, the one attached to the Columbia Special Products bargain reissue series.

They are rarely much better than awful, although there are a few exceptions to that rule. (There are almost always exceptions to the kinds of rules collectors use to find the best sounding records.)

The 6 Eye label domestic stereo pressings of Mingus Dynasty win our shootouts, in this case without exception.

On this title, the 360 label pressings, Black Print or White Print, can sound very good, but they never win shootouts.

We’ve identified a select group of reissues with the potential to do well in shootouts, typically earning a grade of Super Hot (A++) when up against the best originals, which are the only ones that seem to have the potential to earn our top grade, White Hot (A+++).

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Reproducing the Phenomenal Size and Space of Time Out

More Columbia 30th Street Studio Recordings

Time Out is a jazz album that’s been a personal favorite of mine for a very long time, as well as a record I’ve been obsessed with for decades. I spent a lot of time working on my system in order to get this album to sound its best.

It taught me a lot, and for that reason it is a recording that deserves a fair amount of credit for helping me become a better listener.

Here is how we described a copy that won one of our shootouts a while back:

Spacious and transparent, this copy has the big three-dimensional soundstage that makes this record such a joy to listen to. The piano has weight and heft, the drums are big and dynamic, and everything is relaxed and sweet — in short, this copy is doing pretty much everything we want a top quality Time Out to do. 

Listen to the drums on Everybody’s Jumpin’. This album was recorded on a big sound stage and there is a HUGE room which can clearly be heard surrounding the drum kit. Add to that that some of the drums are in the left channel and some of the drums are in the right channel and you have one big drum kit — exactly the way it was intended to sound.

Size and Space

One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy that does all that, it’s an entirely different listening experience.

More letters, reviews and commentaries for recordings made at Columbia’s 30th Street studio.

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This Is Why We Love Columbia in the 60s

More of the Music of Al Kooper

More of the Music of Michael Bloomfield

Please excuse the copying and pasting from previous listings. When records are this good, we tend to say the same things about them, because they are doing all the things we want them to do.

From time to time a record comes our way that sounds absolutely amazing, “Way better than it used to sound” amazing. Progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting and music reproduction at the most advanced levels.

If it’s the kind of record that sounds like the best copy of The Live Adventures of Bloomfield and Kooper from our most recent shootout, we might even let our enthusiasm for its superb fidelity get the better of us. That’s the effect a record as good as the copy we played can have. You just can’t stop yourself from saying one great thing after another about it.

Our over-the-top notes, like those you see below, attempt to convey what it’s like to experience the superb sound we were hearing.

But where is the harm in that? These are notes that no one outside of the staff are ever expected to see. They are helpful to us in writing our commentary and pricing the specific copy we auditioned, but they are practically never quoted in the listings.

The Live Adventures of Bloomfield and Kooper is an example of one of those recordings that comes along from time to time in order to show us sound that we’d almost forgotten was possible.

Oh yes, with the rare properly-cleaned, properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage vinyl LP, played back on top quality equipment in a heavily treated, dedicated soundroom, we can assure you it is very possible indeed. Allow us to make the case with the Shootout Winning original pressing you see below.

The notes for side one read: 

  • Big, Tubey and jumping out
  • Breathy vocals
  • Deep, sustained bass

Side two:

  • Spacious
  • Glowing and rich drums are weighty and 3-D
  • No congestion
  • Extending high and low
  • Silky and present vocals

Side three:

  • Weighty and rich
  • No hardness
  • Extending high and low

Side four:

  • Rich and ? and space
  • More dynamic and 3-D
  • All around good weight

You know what’s unusual about these notes?

They’re the kind of notes we have never written for any Heavy Vinyl reissue, even for the one that won our shootout not long ago.

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Time Further Out – “It’s amazing how well-recorded the group was back then.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

Fred Plaut is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

His work on Time Further Out speaks for itself — we think it’s the best sounding Brubeck recording of them all. 

We could find no information about the venue for this recording. It might be the Columbia Studios known as “The Church” — that would explain the amazing sound quality of the album — but it may just be Plaut’s engineering prowess in another location that makes this some of the best sound to be found on any Brubeck record.

Frederick “Fred” Plaut was a recording engineer and amateur photographer. He was employed by Columbia Records during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, eventually becoming the label’s chief engineer.

Plaut engineered sessions for what would result in many of Columbia’s famous albums, including the original cast recordings of South Pacific, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, jazz LPs Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, Time Out by Dave Brubeck, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty by Charles Mingus.

Wikipedia

Mark Wilder was interviewed about the recording of these Fred Plaut sessions and noted [bold added by me]:

Fred Plaut and Frank Laico were two of Brubeck’s recording engineers. Plaut is a true balance engineer; he’s my idol. I don’t know how he could pull off what he did in three hours.

He continued:

It’s amazing how well-recorded the group was back then. The sound is so three-dimensional, bigger than life.

Yet it’s amazing how little the engineers did to get that sound. They just put one mic a few feet from each instrument, and mixed live to 3-track—for left, center, and right. Then they edited the tape and mixed down to 2-track.

The old stuff sounds better than what we’re doing now. We’ve been going in the wrong direction sound-wise for many years. The layout of the stereo stage was more realistic then, too. Drums were on the left, piano on the right, sax and bass in the middle.

It’s easy to hear what each musician was playing because they were separated spatially. These days, you hear each instrument in stereo, on top of each other. The drums spread all the way between the speakers, and so does the piano.

In one Brubeck recording (Castilian Drums, not on this set), the stereo perspective changes radically within the recording. It starts with drums hard left and piano hard right. But when the drum solo starts, there’s an edit and suddenly you hear the drum set spread out in stereo.

At the end of the solo, you’re back to drums left and piano right. These effects are on Brubeck’s albums Countdown (Columbia CS 8575) and Time Further Out (Columbia CS 8490).

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Abraxas – A 180 gram Columbia Disaster

More of the Music of Santana

Reviews and Commentaries for Abraxas

Sonic Grade: F

There is a 180 gram domestic pressing of Abraxas that may still be available. The reason we never sold it even when we were selling Heavy Vinyl many years ago is that it’s AWFUL. One side, I don’t remember which one, is actually Mono.

You will see people selling this record on Ebay as an audiophile pressing. Believe me, no audiophile in his right mind would want this record.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

You can find these two in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling.  These are also records you can safely avoid.

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Listening in Depth to Santana’s First Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

First off, a 360 label doesn’t mean much on this record except the POTENTIAL for good sound. The badly mastered or pressed copies can be recognized easily: they are muddy and smeary. The recording itself has a bit of that too-many-tubes-in-the-signal-path quality to start with, so unless the record is mastered and pressed clearly and cleanly the whole presentation is likely to turn to mud. 

Santana’s first album came out of nowhere and rocked in a way that few had heard before. In that sense it has something in common with Led Zeppelin’s debut. That album took the blues and added heavy guitars. Santana took African and Latin rhythms and added his own heavy guitar sound. Each is a landmark recording in its own right.

Musicianship

Like Abraxas, when you play a Hot Stamper copy Santana’s first album very loud, soon enough you find yourself marvelling at the musicianship of the group — because the best Hot Stamper pressings, communicating every bit of the energy and clarity the recording has to offer, let you hear what a great band they were.

On badly mastered records, such as the run-of-the-mill domestic LP, or the audiophile pressings on MoFi and CBS, the music lacks the power of the real thing. I want to hear Santana ROCK. Most pressings don’t let me do that. Only the best do.

Side One

Waiting

The first 30 seconds of this track will tell you if you have a good side one. The drums and percussion on the good copies are clean and clear, neither grainy nor smeared. Smearing is the most common problem for the originals, and graininess is the most common problem for reissues, which are usually made from sub generation EQ’d tapes.

And the other thing the Hot Stampers have going for them is deep, solid bass, as mentioned above. There is a bass fundamental on this opening track that’s WAY down there. If you have small speakers you can just forget ever hearing this record sound right, because the bass is critical to Santana’s sound.

Evil Ways

The key thing to listen to on this track is the quality of the vocals. On the best pressings they are very silky and sweet. It’s the kind of sound that modern recordings simply fail to capture. Or they’re not interested in that sound. Whatever the reason is, they don’t have it.

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Time Further Out – We Was Wrong Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

UPDATE 2023

About five years ago we wrote:

The monos we played in our last two or three shootouts didn’t do much for us. They tended to be thin and hard sounding, and of course much of the space of the studio disappears completely. One side of one copy did well enough I suppose, but my advice would be to avoid them if you’re looking for top quality sound.

Years before we had discovered an outstanding mono copy and described it this way:

This Columbia Six-Eye pressing is THE BEST SOUNDING MONO COPY OF THIS ALBUM WE’VE EVER HEARD! The better Mono pressings of this album give you extra immediacy, more solidity to the drums, and energy like you wouldn’t believe. That makes the drum solo on side two sound OUT OF THIS WORLD. Most copies are congested and veiled, but not this one! The sound is spacious and transparent with wonderful presence. You will not believe how lively it is! 

Both sides are rich and full-bodied with lots of sweetness and extension up top. The energy and transparency are wonderful. The bass is a bit tubby, but that’s what you get on these vintage Six Eye pressings. It’s worth it when there’s as much tubey magic as you get on this pressing.

Fast forward to 2023 and once again we manage to stumble upon a rare 6 Eye Mono pressing in our shootout that had the Time Further Out goods:

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this vintage 6-Eye Mono pressing will be very hard to beat – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • It’s extremely unlikely that any mono pressing will win a shootout, but just to keep us on our toes, we like to put some monos of famous albums in our shootouts from time to time to see how they measure up
  • This 2+ early pressing was the best of the bunch, and it’s guaranteed to beat the pants off any modern Heavy Vinyl pressing ever made

So there you have it. The right mono pressings can sound very good indeed.

Apparently, we was wrong to think we was wrong.

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Robert Brook Compares Three Very Different Pressings of Lady in Satin

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billie Holiday

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he has written for one of our favorite records, Lady in Satin.

In this review he compares our White Hot Stamper pressing to his two originals, a Six Eye Mono and a Six Eye Stereo. We knew where this review was headed; we’ve been down that road ourselves. For our most recent Hot Stamper reissue, we noted:

There may be amazingly good sounding original pressings, as amazingly good as this one, but we’ve never run into one and we have our doubts about the existence of such a magical LP – where could they all be hiding?

Add Robert’s two originals to the pile of pressings that sound good, but not as good as we might want them to.

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Barabajagal – Never Played a Good One

My notes: Murky sound.

We’ve played pressings from every era and have yet to hear one sound any good.

A PUBLIC SERVICE

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record loving friends at Better Records.

You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with more than 350 others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made. (On some Hall of Shame records the sound is passable but the music is bad.  These are also records you can safely avoid.)

Note that most of the entries are audiophile remasterings of one kind or another. The reason for this is simple: we’ve gone through the all-too-often unpleasant experience of comparing them head to head with our best Hot Stamper pressings.

When you can hear them that way, up against an exceptionally good pressing, their flaws become that much more obvious and, frankly, that much less excusable.

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