Prestige – Reviews and Commentaries

The Happy Blues on Vintage OJC Is No Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

Some vintage OJC pressings sound good and some don’t.

This one doesn’t.

Typical bad OJC sound – thin and modern, lacking in the Tubey Magic that makes vintage pressings so musically involving.

This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from the 80s, but we found the sound of the OJC pressings we played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that that plays right into the prejudices of most record collectors and audiophiles for whom nothing but an original will do. They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played.

The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. 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 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 biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.

You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.

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Blue Gene – Soulful Jazz at Its Best

More Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder

For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1958 All Tube Analog Prestige recording by Rudy Van Gelder can sound, this killer copy will do the trick.

This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

This IS the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is, of course, a CD of this album, but those of us who possess a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.

What We Listen For on Blue Gene

The best copies are rich and tubey; many pressings were thin and modern sounding, and for that they would lose a lot of points. We want this record to sound like something RVG recorded in 1958, and the best copies give you that sound, without the surface noise and groove damage the originals doubtless suffer from.

Some copies have much more space; some are more present, putting the musicians right in the room with you; some are more transparent, resolving the musical information much better than others, letting you “see” everyone in the studio clearly. Some have more rhythmic drive than others. On some the musicians seem more involved and energetic than they do on the average pressing.

The copies that do all these things better than other copies are the ones that win our shootouts.

This is clearly one of the better copies we have ever played. We think you will enjoy it immensely. And watch for more Gene Ammons records coming to the site soon. With RVG at the board his recordings are often superb.

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The Original Jazz Classics (OJC) Series Got Off to a Bad Start with Sonny’s Worktime Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sonny Rollins’s Albums Available Now

OJC 007, the first Sonny Rollins title they picked to remaster.

Too bad they did such a poor good job with it.

The copy we auditioned did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.

The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is unlikely to ever be of audiophile quality.

There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed? — but we’re pretty sure the OJC will always fall short of the mark.

We created two sections for the OJC label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the (probably, see the paragraph above) bad sounding ones.

If you know of a great sounding pressing of the album, feel free to let us in on what pressing you have and we might just pick one up and give it a listen.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 33 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best. (more…)

We Was Wrong About this Prestige Two-Fer in 2008

The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now

UPDATE

We used to like this record a whole lot more than we do now. Based on what we heard last time we played it, we cannot recommend it.

A classic case of live and learn.

Our previous commentary:

This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP boasts EXCELLENT SOUND, right up there with some the best sounding copies we’ve played.

Three sides out of four sounded surprisingly good, which is three good sides more than the average copy can claim.

Oddly enough, the stampers are identical. Sample to sample variation? Fresh off the stamper transparency? Who’s to say?

I can’t explain it, but I know a better record when I play one. This copy is clearly more transparent, no pun intended.

It’s also been through our extensive cleaning process, which as you can imagine helps the sound immeasurably. 

For more reviews of Two-Fer pressings, click here.

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The Stardust Session – Notes for All Four Sides

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

Superb sound quality courtesy of Rudy van Gelder (1958) and the brilliant mastering of David Turner (1972). The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on these incredibly Hot sides.

We were impressed with the fact that these pressings excel in so many areas of reproduction. What was odd about it — odd to most audiophiles but not necessarily to us — was just how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the right pressing.

The record takes its material from three John Coltrane albums: ‘Bahia’, ‘Stardust’ and ‘Standard Coltrane.’ We would be surprised if the originals of any of them can beat the sound of this reissue. (more…)

The Gene Ammons Story: Gentle Jug

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder

UPDATE 2024

Recently, in preparation for a new shootout, we played a few copies of this album that were laying around.

We were much less impressed with the sound than we were ten years ago when we last played it.

Live and learn or did we just not have the right pressings this time around?

Nobody knows. For now our Gentle Jug project is on hold indefinitely. If you see one for cheap, pick it up and see if it does anything for you.

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