Original Jazz/Blues Classics with Passable Sound

We auditioned these OJC pressings and found them to have no better than passable sound quality.

Some OJC Pressings of Waltz for Debby Can Be Pretty Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby, we took the opportunity to play the early OJC that first came out in the 80s. We found the OJC pressings with the stampers identified below had good, not great sound.

I remember playing the Analogue Productions version from 1992, mastered by Doug Sax, and being shocked at how overly rich, murky, thick and unnatural it sounded. I knew the AP Way Out West was bad. Was every title that Analogue Productions remastered going to sound like it was being played by 50’s JBL speakers powered by Mac 30s?

This was the sound audiophiles had always wanted? This was the sound that made them think they were listening to the master tape? (To prove that bad ideas never die — that sooner or later they return in a different guise — there is a Mr. Hutchison who makes records that sound very similar to those Chad was making in the early 90s. The more things change…)

Back to the OJC of Waltz for Debby. A local fellow who had requested my 1990s catalog, the one in which I say the OJCs just kill the new AP Heavy Vinyl pressings, came over and bought some OJCs, the ones I thought sounded very good, which were the only ones we carried. They were all of  ten bucks each.

He promptly went home, played them and called me to tell me just how awful his AP vinyl of the album sounded and how much better his OJC was in comparison, at less than half the price. I’m sure I said something along the lines of “Tell me something I don’t know!” My credibility established beyond all doubt, he and I soon became fast friends.

I never reviewed the Waltz for Debby on AP, but I wrote reviews for three other AP titles: Way Out West, Chet, and Jazz Giant. Spoiler alert: I thought all three were unbelievably awful.

The G1A/B1 OJC pressing we played suffered these problems:

  • It’s opaque but not too opaque
  • It’s small and a bit dull

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The OJC of All Night Long Is Just Not that Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Byrd Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on an early OJC copy of the album you see pictured and thought the sound would not be good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we like need to charge.

As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, All Night Long is not an album that’s worth the costs associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.

It was dry and bright. This is a sound a many OJC pressings tend to have. They more often than not sound more like CDs than vintage vinyl pressings.

This title would be more or less passable, even to some degree enjoyable, if it were being played on the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s. However, it would not begin to cut it on the high quality modern equipment we (and hopefully our customers) use.

Don’t get us wrong. We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding OJC pressings of the album. If we happen to hear a good one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout. Based on what we’ve heard so far, that’s not in the cards for now.

Perhaps you have a pressing of the record you like. If so, please tell us more about it. You can email me at tom@better-records.com

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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.