Original Jazz/Blues Classics We Didn’t Care For

These are OJC/OBC titles we played and found wanting — musically, sonically or both.

Soultrane Sucks on the Early OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The early OJC reissues from 1982 of this title are awful.

And whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad, but — I’m guessing, never played one so don’t hold me to it — in the opposite way.

The OJC is thin and bright, and the modern reissue (I’m assuming, based on playing scores of them) is probably thick, veiled, overly smooth, lacking in space and boosted in the bass — because that’s the sound that audiophiles record buyers seem to like these days.

Without the excellent sounding 60s and 70s reissues that we are still able to find in audiophile playing condition, all that we would have available to buy for our shootouts would be the originals. 

At the big bucks those records go for nowadays, shootouts would be impossibly expensive.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job on these later pressings!

UPDATE 2025

We were surprised to find that the right stampers on the new OJC pressings can have very good sound. Click on the link below to that Soultrane has joined the group of good sounding modern OJC pressings.

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The Original Jazz Classics Series Put Out a Passable Relaxin’

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

We much prefer the right version of the 70s Two-Fer reissue (PR 24001) to the OJCs of both Cookin’ and Relaxin’ (OJC-190). Previously we had written:

These 70s reissue pressings are practically as good as any we have ever heard. Full-bodied, warm and natural, with plenty of space around all of the players, this is the sound of vintage analog.

It had been a while since we last played the OJC pressing of either album, so we picked up a copy of Relaxin’ and threw it into the shootout, where it did about as badly as expected.

The first side earned our 1+ grade, which means that, like a lot of reissues it’s passable, but really not good enough for a serious audiophile (hopefully meaning you) to bother with, which is why we didn’t even play side two (the N/A you see noted where the grade should be).

The OJC is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I used to have an old school stereo, and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).

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Don’t Skip the OJC, Put It in a Shootout

Of the three early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound we played recently, only one met our standards. At 2+/1.5+, the sound was good, not great.

One copy earned grades of 1+/1+, which means the sound was passable. The last copy had an NFG side two, which means it was just awful.

(Many of the Heavy Vinyl disasters we’ve been cataloging lately have earned that notorious grade. The unacceptably lo- to mid-fi sound even the better ones offer doesn’t seem to bother the audiophiles who rave about them, however.)

So does side two of the OJC pressing have fairly good sound, merely passable sound, or is the sound hopelessly bad?

In the case of this Shelly Manne album, all three, and the only way we were able to discover that is by cleaning up three of them and playing them head to head with real Contemporary pressings in a blinded experiment.

Obviously we were hoping for better results from our OJCs — only one of the copies we played will turn out to be saleable.

Why did we bother? That old bugaboo the profit motive was all that was needed to make us give the OJC pressings a try. We thought we could make money on them but it turns out that the opposite will happen. Oh well, nothing ventured, noting gained.

More importantly, we are not the least bit shy about coming clean and sharing the results with our readers and customers, especially the part about three identical looking copies with the same stamper numbers all sounding very diffferent from each other.

An added bonus is that side two was worse than side one most of the time. That happens often enough, but nobody but us ever seems to want to talk about it.

If we had had ten OJC pressings to play, we probably would have be able to find at least one or two with a grade of 2+/2+, meaning that George Horn probably did a creditable job mastering the album back in 1984 when he cut it for Fantasy, to sell for the very affordable price of $5.98. It’s most likely the pressing plant that let listeners down.

Needs Tubes

The problem here is that this title needs tubes, or, at the very least, the sound of tubes, and George apparently did not have them, or enough of them, in his mastering chain.

Our specific notes can be seen on the left. We mention that the first track has the best sound (1956 dates), the rest falling short for being darker and more crude (“old school,” some dating from 1953).

The West Coast horn players are the reason to buy this title, with horns that are “sweet and tubey,” but of course to hear that kind of sound you will need a real Contemporary pressing, not an OJC — or anything made in the modern era for that matter.

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A Disappointing OJC of Swinging With The Mastersounds

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We did a shootout for this Mastersounds title many years ago. It didn’t sell very well so we decided to give it a rest for a while, something in the range of a decade or so.

Recently we got another couple of copies in, including their other album we used to like on OJC, A Date with the Mastersounds, and found none of the copies we played to be nearly as impressive as we thought they were back in the day. Some quick notes:

  • A Date with the Mastersounds

Vibes are dry and glassy. Not much Tubey Magic.

  • Swinging With The Mastersounds

Rich but veiled sound. Just OK, not great.

With that said, we still like the music, so if you see one of these pressings for cheap and you like vibes-based jazz from the 50s, pick it up and discover the music of The Mastersounds for yourself.

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The 2013 OJC of Brilliant Corners Has a Problem Many OJCs Do

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

Brilliant corners on the 2013 OJC pressing is not a bad record. At $20, roughly the price they sell for on Discogs, you are getting a decent LP for your money, which is not the case with a lot of what’s produced these days, the worst of which can be found here.

The sound is nice and meaty, which is all to the good, but where this pressing falls apart is in the area of transparency, as in, there isn’t much.

In simple language, it is opaque.

This is a very common shortcoming of the new OJC pressings. When they manage to get the tonality right — which is about  half the time — they still come across as crude and underwhelming. They require too much effort from the listener to become involved and stay that way.

If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, and you don’t have a good CD player (a dirty little secret: the standard CD is likely to be better sounding). buy it for cheap, but don’t pay much money for it. You may find that, after a spin or two, playing it is more trouble than it’s worth.

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How Do You Make a Vintage Jazz Recording Sound Wrong?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Albums Available Now

How do you make a vintage jazz recording sound wrong?

Easy. Just take out all the Tubey Magic that was captured on the master tape all those years ago by Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann.

You know the kind of Tubey Magic I’m talking about. It’s the trademark sound of every vintage Contemporary pressing ever made. It’s the defining sound of the best jazz recordings from the era. It’s the reason that jazz lovers and record collectors the world over pay big bucks for vintage pressings — because they have the sound of tubes.

When you take away that one quality — just the one, leaving everything else as it should be: the bass, the mids, the highs, the energy, the space, the size, you name it — what you are left with doesn’t sound right.

It no longer sounds the way a jazz record from 1958 would sound.

If you don’t know that sound, it’s possible that this cheap reissue pressing from 1984 might not be as bothersome for you as it was for us. But we’ve played vintage jazz records from the 50s by the hundreds. They never sound like this. The reissues might, but the best early pressings sure don’t.

Maybe This Is Your Sound?

However, if you happen to like the sound of CDs for some reason, something that is frankly hard to imagine but nevertheless seems to be true, this OJC might just be the ticket.

We’ve never liked that sound, and we sure don’t like this pressing.

Other records we’ve played that sounded like CDs to us can be found here.

We’ve only played three releases on the Music Matters label, but all three of them sounded like CDs to us — Green Street, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and Tina Brooks’ True Blue (review coming someday!).

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Skip the A3/B2 OJC on Some Like It Hot

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Barney Kessel Available Now

Some Like It Hot badly needed to be made using tubes in the mastering chain, but that didn’t happen.

It’s another case of an OJC with zero Tubey Magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. Maybe even better.

I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp, you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your correctly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?

We had two copies of the OJC and one of them did better than this one. It earned a Super Hot grade for one side. If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, avoid these stampers. The sound isn’t awful, but it’s not very good either, especially considering how amazing the tapes must be, based on the sound of our White Hot Stamper shootout winner.

The OJC pressing of this album is much better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).

The OJC pressings of Some Like It Hot are thinner and brighter than even the worst of the later pressings we’ve auditioned. That is decidedly not our sound. It’s not the sound Roy DuNann was famous for, and we don’t like it either, although we have to admit that we did find the sound of many of these OJC pressings more tolerable — even enjoyable — in the past.

Our old system from the 80s and 90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one. Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from those same afflictions.

Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great.

And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve top quality sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutionary advances in audio had not yet come to pass.

It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.

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Skip the OJCs of Letter from Home and Come Along With Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of Excellent Jazz Recordings Available Now

If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, our best advice is to skip it. We found the sound to be much too dry and bright — think CD-like sound — for our tastes. Veiled too, lacking the resolution common to good vintage pressings.

We’ve never played an early pressing of the album, but we know a bad sounding record when we hear one, and this OJC is pretty bad.

It clearly lacks Tubey Magic as well as weight in the lower registers, and that is simply not a sound we can abide, whether it’s found on a cheap jazz reissue or a modern Heavy Vinyl pressing.

Same with Come Along With Me. The copy we played years ago had many of the same problems.

Our OJC Overview

We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings in the more than 37 years we’ve been in the record business.

Some OJC pressings have the potential to be great.

We’ve even found some of the more recent pressings on OJC that have good — not great mind you, but good — sound. (Just to be clear, any OJC produced this century is to our way of thinking a recent pressing.)

Some are we’ve played are just awful.

And the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually throwing one on the turntable and giving it a spin. If it shows promise, we buy a bunch more and see if we can find some good ones.

If the sound is hopeless, we don’t pursue it. We have way too many potentially good sounding records waiting to be played.

It’s a Lot of Work

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like going the extra mile, they draw faulty conclusions based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when evaluating pressings. They are quick to judge the whole series based on a few examples.

OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills!

Those who approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with what can only be described as an utter lack of seriousness can be found on every audiophile forum there is. The youtubers are the worst, but are the self-identified aristocrats of audio any better?

I see no evidence to support that proposition, for or against. None of them in our estimation seem to know much about the mysteries and arcana that lie at the heart of the vinyl LP.

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Looking For a Top Quality Jazz Record? Skip the OJC of Screamin’ the Blues OJC-080

Hot Stamper Pressings of Excellent Jazz Recordings Available Now

If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, best to skip it.

The sound is dry and bright. It’s passable, but it’s certainly not very good, and even the CD might be better, assuming you are willing to go through a number of discs until you find one that is mastered properly, assuming that there ever was such a thing.

Finding good sounding pressings of classic albums has never been easy. Here are some tips that may help you make more progress.

Original Jazz Classics

Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones. Some are awful. And the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.

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Skip the Original OJC of West Coast Sound (C3507)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2025

A new shootout for this title gave us a better understanding of the OJC relative to the other pressings we were playing. We came across one fairly good sounding OJC pressing out of the three we played, one that earned grades of 2+/1.5+, so if you have an OJC, play it and see whether it is one of the good ones or, as is most likely the case, one of the bad ones.

Side two is the side to play to hear what we are on about. The grades ranged from decent, 1.5+, to just awful, NFG.

The sound of the early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound that we played recently were not to our liking.

They are brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.

That is decidedly not our sound.

We have to admit that we used to find the sound of many of these OJC pressings much more tolerable in the past.

More than tolerable. Enjoyable. Recommendable. Saleable even.

Nothing to be ashamed of, that was many years ago. As you may already know, live and learn is our motto. Getting it wrong is a feature, not a bug, of collecting if your goal is to find the best sounding pressings of the music you love.

(If you have some other goal, this may not be the right blog for you. Definitely steer clear of this website. The prices there are ridiculous!)

It’s true: Our old system from the 80s and 90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one.

That was thirty or more years ago. Pretty much every dynamic speaker system I ran into had that sound. And I was never a fan of screens or horns. Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great. It sure sounded right to me at the time.

And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve substantially better sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutions in audio had not yet come to pass. It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.