Original Jazz/Blues Classics We Didn’t Care For

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

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!).

Much of Kevin Gray‘s work has the kind of sound we associate with the compact disc. We don’t understand why everyone doesn’t hear how badly mastered his records are, but we have no trouble recognizing their many faults. They are, to one degree or another:

The OJC pressings of Harold in the Land of Jazz we played were thinner and brighter than even the worst of the 70s LPs we auditioned.

They did not make the cut for our shootout, a shootout we abandoned years ago because the early pressings we liked were just too rare, too noisy and too expensive to justify the cost and effort that would be required to make a shootout a reality.

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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

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.

How Does the D1/D1 Jazz Giant Black Label Pressing Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

Even though the Black label original of Jazz Gianot we played in our shootout held its own well enough, it did suffer from a slight case of “old record” sound.

Head to head with the best vintage reissues, it was a bit crude, didn’t extend fully on the top end, and wasn’t as resolving in the midrange.

The fact that it earned a Super Hot (A++) sonic grade means that it could not have sounded too much like an old record. It was still doing most everything right.

It just had a few sonic shortcomings we recognized were holding it back.

The reissues that beat it in the shootout showed us just how good the album could sound, maybe not night and day better, but definitely better, a full grade better.

The Black Label original we played would still beat the pants off the godawful Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl pressing that came out in the 90s, the one mastered by the formerly-brilliant Doug Sax.

For those who may not have been collecting back then, we describe in great detail the bad sound of the Heavy Vinyl pressing that AP produced for their version of Way Out West in 1992.

Mobile Fidelity got into the reissue act in 1994, making murky-sounding records on 200 gram vinyl and calling them Anadisqs.

Classic Records started producing their bright, screechy reissues of Living Stereo titles that year as well.

It seems a lot of bad sounding records were being made back then!

Is it any different now? (If it is, please contact me at tom@better-records.com and tell me what you think the differences are. I am at a loss after playing these six Heavy Vinyl titles in 2024 and finding that all of them fell well short of the mark. What mark is that, you ask? Why, the mark set by their vintage counterparts.)

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Art Pepper Today – Latest Findings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

In 2010 we wrote a commentary about the album which can be found here.

It’s a long story that goes into great detail comparing the sound of the original Galaxy pressings with those of the much more common OJC’s.

Fourteen years later (!) and here we are, finally getting to the point where we have enough copies of Art Pepper Today to do a proper shootout.

Since this is a title we have not played in a very long time, we took the opportunity to give a quick listen to both kinds of pressings just to make sure that both could be expected to do well enough to be included in the shootout.

The OJCs Fall Short in a Different Way

Well, it turns out that the OJC pressings are no longer cutting it. That’s money down the drain.

It seems to be the case that they are dark and hard sounding compared to the Galaxy pressings.

This is a bit surprising because most of the OJC pressings that we don’t like are thin and bright, not dark and hard.

That’s not the way OJC’s typically sound, but in the world of records, when has that ever counted for anything?

Patterns are helpful up to a point, but on this album, the patterns we see across the label have broken down, which is why our business is built upon a foundation of playing every record we sell and judging it strictly on its own merits.

There are just too many exceptions to whatever patterns we may think we have detected.

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Audiophiles Should Skip the OJC of More Swinging Sounds

Hot Stamper Pressings of Well Recorded Jazz Albums In Stock Now

The vintage OJC pressings we played in our most recent shootout suffer from sonic problems common to many of these reissues: it was bright and dry.

To help you avoid records with this kind of sound, better suited to those who might prefer the sound of a compact disc to vintage vinyl, we have linked to others with similar problems on the blog.

Here are some of the titles we found had dry sound and here are some that had bright sound.

The OJC pressing of this album is clearly 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 More Swinging Sounds 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 in the past.

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This Thelonious Monk Title Didn’t Make the Grade on Any Pressing We Played

More of the Music of Thelonious Monk

Every copy of this record we have ever played sounded terrible. The early pressings sounded bad and the OJC sounded bad. We gave up on the album a long time ago. Why throw good money after bad?

Some audiophile reviewers prefer to review only the records that sound good to them and ignore the rest. We think this does the audiophile community a disservice.

Like Consumer Reports, we like to test things. They test toasters, we test records. We put them through their paces and let the chips fall where they may.

They want to find out if the things they are testing offer the consumer good quality and value.

We want to find out if the records we are testing offer the audiophile good sound and music.

It takes a lot of people and a healthy budget to carry out large numbers of these kinds of tests.

No other record dealers, record reviewers or record collectors could possibly have auditioned more than a small fraction of the records that we’ve played. We’ve been looking for the best sounding records for a very long time. Now, with a staff of ten or more, we can buy, clean and play records in numbers that are unimaginable for any single person to attempt.

That puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings.

Yes, we have the resources, the staff and the budget. More importantly, we came up with a different approach.

We’ve learned through thousands and thousands of hours of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

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Another Bad Sounding Chet Baker Album on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

It Could Happen to You badly needed to be mastered with some tubes in the chain, but that didn’t happen. We’ve written a fair amount on that subject, and you can find more here.

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 (like the Mac 30 you see below), you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?

The OJC pressing of this album is obviously better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of records 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).

For a more complete list of those records, click here.

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