Columbia/Epic – Selections

Select commentaries and reviews for Columbia/Epic

Did Gary Puckett and the Union Gap Ever Make a Good Sounding Record?

Their recordings may be amazing, but the pressings made from them sure leave a lot to be desired.

In fact, their music sounds better on the radio than it does on the half dozen pressings we’ve played, of the one pictured above and other titles as well. If we hear a good sounding pressing down the road, we would certainly be open to the possibility of doing a shootout for it.

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 records in the Hall of Shame 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.

So Many Columbia Classical LPs Are Bad Sounding – Why Is That?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Vintage Columbia Albums Available Now

Columbia classical recordings have a tendency to be shrill, upper-midrangy, glary and hard sounding.

The upper mids are usually nasally and pinched; the strings and brass will screech and blare at you in the worst way.

If Columbia’s goal was to drive the audiophile classical music lover screaming from the room, most of the time they succeeded brilliantly. Occasionally they fail.

When they do we call those pressings Hot Stampers.

Columbia Rock and Jazz

When I play Columbia recordings from the ’50s and ’60s of Brubeck, Ellington, Miles and other jazz giants, what strikes me most is how natural, warm and sweet the sound is. I was playing an old mono Ellington record recently and when the clarinet solo came in, it almost took my breath away. The sound of the instrument was that real. This from a mid-’50s run-of-the-mill Columbia pressing. Those guys (the engineers and the musicians) knew what they were doing.

Sometimes when I read about the extraordinary lengths modern engineers go to in order to use the highest quality audiophile equipment: custom microphones, tape recorders, wire, and the like, it makes me wonder how many of the best sounding records in the world managed to be recorded without any of that stuff. RCA didn’t need it for their Living Stereos. Decca didn’t need it. Contemporary Records managed to record the best sounding jazz records without it.

How did all those great sounding records get made with such bad equipment? I guess we’ll never know.

Columbia may not have always recorded the best “serious” jazz, but they were very serious about the sound of their jazz. Outside of Contemporary, Columbia has the consistently best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard.


Further Reading

Someday My Prince Will Come – We Played a Good Sounding Reissue in 2014

More of the Music of Miles Davis

This Red Label reissue DESTROYED the similar copies we played it against, and was also surprisingly competitive with our Super Hot (and Super Noisy) Six Eye ref copy.

Most of these later pressings have superior clarity (compared to the earlier ones) but lack nearly all of the tubey magic. This one’s amazingly clean and clear, but still delivers on the tubey qualities — it’s richer, warmer, and sweeter than any other Red Label pressing we played.

I think that the very best Six Eye copies are still a step up in class [I don’t have to think it, I know it], but you can be sure that one of those would set you back a lot of bread. If you want to hear this music sound great without spending an arm and a leg, a Hot Red Label copy like this is the ticket. There’s lots of ambience, plenty of tubey magic, and amazing presence. Miles’ trumpet sounds amazing, with lots of breath and just enough bite. The clarity is INCREDIBLE.

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We Give Up on Chicago III, For Now Anyway

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

Don’t hold your breath for a Hot copy of this album — we just attempted a shootout and came up empty-handed. I doubt we’ll ever find a copy that does what we want it to.


UPDATE 2023

We finally did manage to do a shootout, and this is the copy that ended up on the site on a Hot Stamper pressing. As the response was underwhelming, Chicago 3 has been tagged as a never again title, a record you, dear reader, will have to find for yourself.

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