Tone Poets

Take it from Joe Harley who supervises their reissues.

The LPs are mastered directly from the original analog master tapes by Kevin at his incredible facility called Cohearent Mastering. We go about it in the exact same way that we did for so many years for the Music Matters Blue Note reissues. We do not roll off the low end, boost the top or do any limiting of any kind. We allow the full glory of the original Blue Note masters to come though unimpeded!

Short of having an actual time machine, this is as close as you can get to going back and being a fly on the wall for an original Blue Note recording session.

Kevin Gray Sacrifices Another Blue Note to the Lo-Fi Crowd

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

We did a shootout for Cornbread in 2023 and again in 2025. For our latest one, we were fortunate to be able to include both the Tone Poets pressing that came out in 2019 as well as the 75th Anniversary Blue Note pressing from 2014.

Here is the way we described a Hot Stamper that ended up being the best sounding pressing we played on one of its sides, and coming in second on the other side.

  • The sound is everything that’s good about Rudy Van Gelder‘s recordings – it’s present, spacious, full-bodied, Tubey Magical, dynamic and, most importantly, alive in that way that modern pressings never are
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied – this pressing was a big step up over nearly all other copies we played

After hearing a copy of the album that sounded as good as that one, the Tone Poets pressing would have had to be at least a bit of a letdown, right?

To be fair, all it really has to be is good sounding. For $30, the price of the average copy that sells on Discogs, can you really expect great?

I don’t know what any of the purchasers of these Tone Poets records — of this or any other title — are expecting for their thirty bucks, but I can tell you what they are getting. We took notes while their remastered pressing played, and here’s what we heard.

Side One

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If You’re Just Getting Started, Beware of LPs that Will Inhibit Your Progress

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

Robert Brook wrote a scathing review of the Tone Poets pressing of One Flight Up in 2023, much to the dissatisfaction of some of his readers. I was the first to leave a comment as I thought he hit the nail on the head when he said:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

The snare sounds muted. the piano weak, the horns, especially Gordon’s saxophone, resolves poorly and becomes increasingly tiresome to listen to. On my first listen I lasted about 3 minutes into side 1, mostly because I couldn’t stand the way the sax was sounding.

I posted the comments below on Robert’s review. (I have taken the liberty to rewrite some of my comments for the purposes of clarity, along with some additional thoughts.)

Robert,

Another great post. I have many comments to make, so here goes.

When audiophiles prefer records which are clearly second-rate, more often than not I chalk it up to their lack of a better record to play. In order to hear what they are missing, they have to have a record that somehow makes clear to them precisely which aspects of the sound are failing, or at the very least, not up to par.

You could give out the stamper numbers for your Blue Note reissue — I would be surprised if it does not have VAN GELDER STEREO in the dead wax — and those who like the Tone Poets release of One Flight Up could easily find one on Discogs or Ebay and do the comparison for themselves.

But you know what? I would bet you dollars to donuts they will never do that. They simply won’t bother.

To some audiophiles who collect records, collecting is simply not about sound quality.

It’s about collecting the right audiophile pressings.

These folks don’t want some old Blue Note reissue from the 70s. They want a fancily-packaged remastered record on high quality vinyl that’s made by a label that really cares. If it’s a numbered limited edition, even better!

If these people wanted to find out what is wrong with the sound of the Tone Poets pressing you played — thanks for laying it all out in detail so no one can doubt that you listened carefully and heard what’s really in those grooves — they could easily find a vintage copy of the record that would make a mockery of the one they own.

Twenty years ago I wrote something about this very subject:

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Kevin Gray Returns to the Scene of the Crime for One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Robert Brook wrote about the Tone Poets remastered pressing of One Flight Up a few year back. We noted at the time:

We have never heard the Tone Poets pressing that Robert played against the Van Gelder cutting he discusses in his commentary.

We have one in stock and are just waiting to do the shootout for the album so that we can compare it to the better pressings we know we will find.

You may have read that we were knocked out by a killer copy way back in 2007. We expect to be no less knocked out in 2023.

Make that 2025. (Clean Blue Note pressings are hard to come by.)

Robert concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is an excerpt:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

Now that we’ve played the Tone Poets pressing against the best Blue Notes we could find, we know exactly what he means!

Kevin Gray had previously cut the record for Cisco and made a real mess of it, so we are not the least bit surprised that this newer version is every bit as bad sounding as that one.

Why anyone is hiring this hack to make records is a mystery to those of us who play them, and if for some reason it isn’t a mystery to you, it should be.

How inaccurate and unrevealing does a stereo have to be in order to hide the shortcomings of this incompetently mastered record? If you have such a stereo — and there seem to be plenty of them out there in audio land, judging by the fact that Tone Poets is still in business — now is the time to get rid of it, or, at the very least, start making major improvements.

You might want to consider taking some audio advice from us along those lines.

Robert Brook has plenty to say on that subject as well.

Here are the notes we took while playing the Tone Poets pressing after completing our shootout. We had already heard some killer copies, the White Hot shootout winners, so we knew just how good the record could sound.

Side One

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Can Every Audiophile System Do Its Job Well?

More on the Subject of Speaker Advice

That depends on exactly what job you think you’re giving it to do.

If its job is to allow you to enjoy music in the comfort of your home, then the little box speakers you see pictured to the left can do that job just fine, with the caveat that you must be able to enjoy the kind of sound that comes out of little boxes.

If the job you give your stereo to do is to reproduce the full range of music with high fidelity, then the little boxes you see pictured are going to fail miserably. Until the laws of physics are repealed, however that might happen, they will never be able to reproduce music in a lifelike way.

I like big dynamic speakers because they do a better job of reproducing music in a lifelike way compared to every other speaker I have ever heard, horns included, which can be very lifelike indeed, but have other shortcomings that I cannot abide.

This is not just another post bashing small speakers. I say these things to introduce the comment sent to me that you see below.

I received this anonymous letter recently in reply to a commentary I had written entitled Tone Poets and one-legged Tarzans.

In that post, I took a certain person (rl1856) to task for making judgments about pressings using speakers that are not capable of doing the job he wants them to do, which is to make it possible for him to “easily hear differences in LP quality.”

An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.

Another poster defended rl1856’s claims for the abilities of his system to judge different pressings, noting that his criticisms of these remastered records — both on Tone Poets and Classic Records — generally align with mine.

I find this ending hilarious: “Never Played One – To be clear, we have never played a Tone Poets record. We’ve played many titles mastered by Kevin Gray, and we know that he is credited with mastering some records for the label. Without exception we find that his remastered records leave a lot to be desired. You can find many of them in our Hall of Shame. Anyone defending his work to me has some heavy lifting to do.”

You condemn rl1856 for expressing an opinion regarding something YOU ADMIT YOU NEVER HEARD because you believe his equipment is not resolving enough ? The irony is that his opinion largely mirrors yours regarding the sonic virtues of original RVG recordings ! How is it that he, listening through his “inferior” system can hear the virtues you ascribe to RVG pressings, and also hear when those virtues are not present?

My reply, after a week of thinking about the points this gentleman makes, can be seen below.

Hi,
Thanks for writing.

Little box speakers do produce sound of some quality. It would be foolish for me to say that one can’t actually hear something through them. The question is how much?

I believe the answer is not much, and that nobody reviewing records, or comparing one pressing to another, should be fooling himself into thinking he can do either one with a speaker of such little fidelity to the sound of live music.

Good stereos playing good records can sound like live music. With the volume up high and a shootout winning pressing on the table, in our studio the best of RVG’s recordings sound very much like live music

Does anyone think that, brought into this gentleman’s listening room wearing a blindfold and seated in the listening chair, he could be fooled into thinking he was hearing live music instead something coming out of some boxes?

Nothing I’ve played that Kevin Gray mastered, when played on the system we use — the one we developed specifically to evaluate the sound quality of records — was ever noticeably better than mediocre.

We’ve played his records by the score. They all suffer from the same suite of shortcomings to one degree or another, the specifics of which we have described in detail in post after post throughout this blog. (Here is a good example of some of his recent work.)

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Robert Brook Shoots Out One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

We have never heard the Tone Poets pressing that Robert played against the Van Gelder cutting he discusses in the commentary below.

We have one in stock and are just waiting to do the shootout for the album so that we can compare it to the better pressings we know we will find.

UPDATE 2025

We have now played the Tone Poets pressing for ourselves, and if anything, Robert is being too kind!

You may have read that we were knocked out by a killer copy way back in 2007. We expect to be no less knocked out in 2023.

Robert concludes with his take on the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is a excerpt:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

He goes on in much more detail, but this is exactly the kind of sound we hear on one Heavy Vinyl pressing after another. For some reason, none of these shortcomings appears to bother the fans of the label. I get why this guy is missing the boat: he actually thinks a system with five inch woofers can play jazz. What possible excuses could these other people have? [1]

The complete review can be found below. If you are considering following the crowd and buying some of this label’s albums, you might want to take it slow. (Those of you with five inch woofers can charge right ahead. The sonic problems with the Tone Poets releases Robert Brook describes would barely be audible on such a system, so get while the gettin’s good. Just make sure you are never tempted to upgrade to big speakers. You could find yourself in the unfortunate position of needing a new record collection to go along with them. Unlike Tone Poets releases, good records ain’t cheap.)

Dexter Gordon’s ONE FLIGHT UP: One of the Better TONE POETS?

[1] This is rhetorical question. These other folks have no excuses. They have exactly the sound quality they have earned by underutilizing the two most important audio resources they have at their disposal: time and money.

If they have failed to put in enough of either one or both, they have only themselves to blame for letting themselves be fooled by the chalatans currently marketing one meretricious [2] Heavy Vinyl pressing after another.

If they decide to remedy this sad state of affairs, we are more than happy to guide them in the new and exciting direction we’ve pioneered over the course of the last twenty years or so. The advice we give in this commentary would be a good place to start: first get good sound – then you can recognize and acquire good records

For another 60+ pieces of record collecting advice, more than enough to keep anyone busy for months, perhaps years, please click here.

[2] To save you the trouble of looking it up, Merrian-Webster defines meretricious as apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity. Used to suggest pretense, insincerity, and cheap or tawdry ornamentation.

For a deeply meretricious release of recent vintage (OBI strip!, custom booklet!, premium heavy vinyl!, fold-open cover!), see The Cars on Rhino. The only thing left out of the package was a good sounding LP.

Further Reading

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Tone Poets and One-Legged Tarzans

More Unsolicited Audio Advice

A tenet of conservatism is that we must all accommodate ourselves to living in the world that exists, not the world we might want to pretend exists, or the world we would like to exist.

The laws of physics are laws — not theories, not recommendations — and they operate independently of how convenient we may find them.

It follows from this — if you will allow me to make the case — that not everybody with a stereo can play Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings properly, and some people cannot play Tarzan at all. (More on that below.)

There is a fellow, rl1856, who made some comments on Robert Brook’s blog, addressing the Tone Poets pressings of RVG’s recordings vis-a-vis vintage pressings that RVG mastered. (Emphasis added.)

rl1856 writes:

An original RVG 1st or 2nd pressing has a visceral, “edge of the seat” feeling that is missing in the TP [Tone Poets] and BN [Blue Note] Classic reissues. The RVG has a tighter stereo spread, and is voiced so that the listener feels they are very close to the musicians. The TP and Classic remasters have a more distant perspective. The soundstage is wider, but the added apparent distance between musician and listener significantly reduces the impact of the music. OTOH, the reissues have greater extension at frequency extremes, and reproduce more micro detail than original pressings. We know that RVG used a surprising amount of EQ when mastering his LPs back in the day. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we want ? A better version of what we are familiar with, including EQ compromises, or a more accurate representation of what was actually captured on the master tape in RVG’s studio ? The answers may be mutually exclusive.

My system: Linn LP12 ITTOK LVII, SoundSmith Denon 103D, Audio Research SP10MKIII, Luxman MA 88 monoblocks, or Triode TRV 845PSE, or Mac 240, KEF LS50. Resolving enough to easily hear differences in LP quality.

When someone reveals that their equipment is simply not capable of reproducing the sound of live music, we can safely ignore whatever opinions they have offered about the records under discussion.

It’s obvious that they have played them with unacceptably low levels of fidelity. If they want to make the case that they in fact are able to reproduce music with acceptable fidelity, we would need to know more about their system and room in order to take such a claim seriously.

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