- A vintage East Wind 33 RPM Japanese import pressing with outstanding grades from start to finish
- A top album in both rarity and demand – you’d be hard pressed to find another copy with this kind of transparency, clarity, presence, and sound (assuming you could find one)
- This is one of the best sounding copies with all 7 tracks we have ever played
- Lee Herschberg recorded these sessions direct to disc – he’s the guy behind the most amazing piano trio recording I have ever heard, a little album called The Three
- The star of this record is Shelly Manne, who really plays up a storm
- This 33 RPM version features all seven of the original tracks – “Greensleeves” and “Django” were omitted from the shorter 45 RPM pressing
Record Collecting for Audiophiles – Japanese Pressings
Holst / The Planets – On Japanese Vinyl at 45 RPM, It’s Just Awful
More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets
This EMI 45 RPM Japanese Import 2 LP set is considered one of the great Planets by many audiophiles, but it’s not, based on our playing of a copy we had years ago, which means it belongs in our Audiophile Hall of Shame.
The best copies on British or Dutch EMI vinyl are clearly better than this “audiophile” pressing.
What could be less surprising?
This is precisely why we dislike Japanese pressings as a rule — they sound like this audiophile trash.
Our favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.
The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile
You may have seen the following text in another listing, but it bears repeating.
There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.
There has been one big change from the days when I self-identified as a freshly minted audiophile in the ’70s.
Yes, the records being marketed to audiophiles these days may have second- and third-rate sound, but at least now they have good music. That’s progress, right?
The title reviewed above is a good example of the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to put up with back in the old days, long before we had anything resembling a clue.
This one clearly belongs on our list of Bad Audiophile Records.
You might be asking: What Kind of Audio Fool Was I? to buy a dumbass record like this.
It’s a fair question. Yes, I admit I was foolish enough to buy records like this and expect it to have good music, or at least good sound. Of course it had neither. Practically none of these kinds of records ever did. Sheffield and a few others made some good ones, but most Direct to Disc recordings were crap.
As clueless as I was, even back in the day I could tell that I had just thrown my money away on this lipsticked-pig in a poke.
But I was an audiophile, and like a certain Mr. Mulder, I wanted to believe. These special super-hi-fidelity records were being made for me, for special people like me, because I had expensive equipment and regular records are never going to be good enough to play on my special equipment, right?
To say I was wrong to think about audio that way is obviously an understatement. Over the course of the last forty years, I (and to be fair, my friends and my staff) have been wrong about a lots of things in the worlds of records and audio.
You can read more about many of the things we got wrong under the heading: Live and Learn.
The good news? Audio Progress is real and anyone who goes about doing audio the right way can achieve a great deal.
Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto / Getz-Gilberto on Japanese Vinyl
Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now
More Reviews and Commentaries for Japanese Pressings
Sonic Grade: C
This is a Minty looking Verve Japanese Import LP. It’s not competitive with the best domestic pressings, but you could definitely do worse. Trying to find domestic copies that aren’t trashed is getting harder every day, so if you’re a click and pop counter, this copy may be the ticket.
Stan Getz is a truly great tenor saxophonist, the cool school’s most popular player. This LP is all the evidence you need. Side 1 has those wonderfully relaxed Brazilian tempos and the smooth sax stylings of Stan Getz.
Side two for me is even more magical. Getz fires up and lets loose some of his most emotionally intense playing. These sad, poetic songs are about feeling more than anything else and Getz communicates that so completely you don’t have to speak Portugese to know what Jobim is saying. Call it cool jazz with feeling.
A Must Own Jazz Record
We consider this album a Masterpiece. It’s a recording that should be part of any serious Jazz Collecton.
Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Further Reading
The Three – Forget the Wrong Direct Disc on Eastwind
Hot Stamper Pressings of The Three Available Now
Reviews and Commentaries for The Three
There are two takes for the Direct Disc, the second of which is terrible and the first of which can be found with Hot Stamper sound.
The second take is so bad I simply cannot stand to listen to it anymore, no matter how good the sound is. And most of the direct disc copies do not sound all that good anyway, truth be told.
The only combination of music and sound that makes any sense to us here at Better Records is take 1 of the direct disc, the 45 RPM from tape, and the 33 from that same tape, which is the version that is found on the Inner City label.
The Inner City LPs are exceptionally difficult to find in quiet condition on flat vinyl. I can’t tell you how many I run across that are noisy and warped. I used to buy them off eBay but I got so many bad ones I finally just gave up and threw in the towel.
I could go on for days about the sound of this album and how much I like the music, but for now I’m going to let our previous commentary suffice. Believe me, you have probably never heard a record like this in your life, it’s that good.
Let’s Talk Energy
This is a quality no one seems to be writing about, other than us of course, but what could possibly be more important? On this record, the more energetic copies took the player’s performances to a level beyond all expectations. It is positively SHOCKING how lively and dynamic this record is. I know of no other recording with this combination of sonic and musical energy. It is sui generis, in a league of its own.
Ne Plus Ultra Piano Trio
This is without a doubt my favorite piano trio record of all time.
Joe Sample, Shelly Manne and Ray Brown only made one album together, this one, recorded direct to disc right here in Los Angeles for Eastwind in the Seventies. Joe Sample for once in his life found himself in a real Class A trio, and happily for jazz fans around the world he rose to the occasion. Actually it was more like an epiphany, as this is the one piano trio album I put in a class by itself. All three of The Three are giving us the best they’ve got on this November day in 1975.
When it comes to small combo piano jazz, there is none better.
The Three / Self-Titled (45 RPM)
More Shelly Manne
More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano
- Amazing sound throughout this Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them
- The transients are uncannily lifelike – listen for the powerful kinetic energy produced when Shelly whacks the hell out of his cymbals
- My favorite Piano Trio Jazz Album of All Time; every one of the tracks is brilliantly arranged and performed
- 4 stars: “One of Joe Sample’s finest sessions as a leader” – with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown, we would say it’s clearly his finest session, as a leader or simply as the piano player in a killer trio
- Some of the other records we’ve discovered with Top Jazz Piano Sound can be found here
- More Amazing Sounding Piano Recordings, of every kind of music, can be found here
If you want to hear the full six tunes recorded by The Three at that famous Hollywood session (which ran all day and long into the night, 4 AM to be exact), our 33 RPM pressings are your best bet.
If you want absolutely amazing, mind-blowing, you-are-there sound, a Hot Stamper 45 is the only way to go.
The music is so good that I personally would not want to live without the complete album. The Three is, in fact, my favorite Piano Trio Jazz Album of All Time; every one of those six tracks is brilliantly arranged and performed (if you have the right takes of course; more about that later).
This album checks off a number of important boxes for us here at Better Records:
- It’s a Jazz Demo Disc, especially when played on big speakers at loud levels
- It’s the Best Sounding Joe Sample album we know of
- It’s a Masterpiece as well as a member of our Core Jazz Collection
- It’s a Personal Favorite, and a record we’ve been obsessed with for close to 30 years
Takemitsu / Ichiyanagi – Percussions in Colors / Yoshihara
More Classical and Orchestral Recordings
More Audiophile Recordings
- A rare, limited edition Direct to Disc Japanese import pressing of experimental works performed by Sumire Yoshihara, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides
- So transparent, dynamic and real, this copy raises the bar for the sound of this kind of unique percussive music on vinyl
- Loads of presence, with richness and fullness that showed us just how good the Direct to Disc medium can be at its best
Stan Getz – Live and Learn
More of the Music of Stan Getz
Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now
A classic case of We Was Wrong.
Many years ago we had written these silly lines in a review:
Of course, you would never know this is a good recording by playing the average domestic copy. This Japanese LP is one of the few pressings that can show you that this wonderful smoky night club jazz LP really can have Demo Disc sound.
Ridiculous, right? Well, at the time we believed it. Now our understanding is quite a bit more sophisticated, in the sense that the Japanese pressing is clearly better than many originals, but certainly not all of them.
More importantly, there are amazing sounding domestic reissues of the album that we’ve auditioned over the last ten years or so that really blew our minds and helped to set an even higher standard for the sound of Getz Au Go Go.
Our old story:
Way back in 2005 I discussed this very subject when listing a sealed copy:
There are pressing variations for this title on Japanese vinyl, and there’s no way to know what this one sounds like but all of them are better than any other pressing I know of. As I played the open copy we have listed on the site (1/12/05) I couldn’t help but marvel at the quality of the sound.
These days we would crack open a sealed one, clean it up and shoot it out with any others we could lay our hands on, because finding a copy with sound like this is a positive THRILL.
I’m no fan of Japanese pressings as readers of this Web site know very well, but the Japanese sure got this one right!
The domestic copies of this album are mediocre at best — there’s simply no real top end to be found on any Verve pressing I have ever heard.
The top end is precisely where the magic is! Astrud Gilberto’s breathy voice needs high frequencies to sound breathy.
Gary Burton’s vibes need high frequencies to emerge from the mix, otherwise you can hardly hear them.
And Stan Getz’s sax shouldn’t sound like it’s being played under a blanket.
The only version of this album that allows you to hear all the players right is a Japanese pressing, and then only when you get a good one.
That was our understanding in 2005, after being seriously into audio and records for 30 years, as a professional audiophile record dealer for 18 of them. Clearly we had a lot to learn, and we were on the road to learning it, having embarked on our first real Hot Stamper shootout just the year before. (We had been doing them less formally since the ’90s of course. It was only in 2004 that we were able to do them with the requisite scientific protocols in place.)
In 2005, we simply did not have the cleaning system or the playback system capable of showing us what was wrong with the sound of the Japanese pressing we were so impressed by at the time.
And we couldn’t clean and play the standard Verve pressings right either.
We were unable to move forward. The technologies we needed to get to the truth had not been invented yet.
The Revolutions in Audio of the last twenty years are are responsible for allowing us to get the domestic pressings — originals and reissues — to sound much better than the Japanese imports we mistakenly thought were superior.
When I got started in audio in the early- to mid- ’70s, the following important elements of the modern stereo system did not exist:
- Stand-alone phono stages.
- Modern cabling and power cords.
- Vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment.
- Synchronous Drive Systems for turntable motors.
- Carbon fiber mats that sit on top of massive metal turntable platters.
- Highly adjustable tonearms (for VTA, etc.) with extremely delicate adjustments and precision bearings.
- And there wasn’t much in the way of innovative room treatments like the Hallographs we use.
And one of the most important revolutions is not a playback technology per se, but makes much better playback possible:
- Modern record cleaning machines and fluids.
A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level that is required for us to do our record shootouts and be confident about our findings, and we pursued every one of them about as far as time and money allowed.
Practically every one of the 5000 listings on this blog is a testament to the changes brought about by those hard-won advancements.
For a further discussion of these issues, please click here.
Further Reading
Lee Ritenour – Friendship
More Lee Ritenour
More Audiophile Recordings
- Superb sound throughout this original Direct-to-Disc Japanese import pressing, with both sides earning Double Plus (A++) grades – fairly quiet vinyl too
- Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the guitar is surprisingly real here
- Both of these sides are Tubey Magical, lively and funky, with the kind of rich, solid sound that will fill your listening room from wall to wall
- “The third of three Lee Ritenour sets originally cut for Japanese JVC matches the studio guitarist with … Ernie Watts (on tenor and soprano), both Dave and Don Grusin on keyboards, electric bassist Abraham Laboriel, drummer Steve Gadd and percussionist Steve Forman.”
This is one of my all time favorite audiophile discs. It’s actually real music.
The song “Woody Creek” is wonderful and reason enough to own this excellent album. The guitar of Lee Ritenour and the saxophone of Ernie Watts double up during a substantial portion of this song and the effect is just amazing.
Special kudos should go to Ernie Watts on sax, who blows some mean lines. But everybody is good on this album, especially the leader, Lee Ritenour. I saw these guys live and they put on a great show.
By the way, looking in the dead wax I see this record was cut by none other than Stan Ricker of Mobile Fidelity fame himself!
Vivaldi / The Four Seasons – Direct to Disc at 45 RPM
More of the Music of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Hot Stamper Pressings of Excellent Direct-to-Disc Recordings
This RCA Direct-to-Disc 45 RPM Double LP has awful sound, with exceptionally hard and shrill string tone.
This is precisely why we dislike Japanese pressings as a rule — they sound like this audiophile trash.
If you own this album, it should make a good one for testing string tone and texture. The strings on this record are awful, and they should sound awful on your stereo too.
The Big Picture from a Lifelong Audiophile
You may have seen this text in another listing, but it bears repeating.
There is nothing new under the sun, and that is especially true when it comes to bad sounding audiophile records. The world is full of them.
There has been one big change from the days when I self-identified as a freshly minted audiophile in the ’70s.
Yes, the records being marketed to audiophiles these days may have second- and third-rate sound, but at least now they have good music. That’s progress, right?
The title reviewed above is a good example of the kind of crap we newbie audiophiles used to put up with back in the old days, long before we had anything resembling a clue.
This one clearly belongs on our list of Bad Audiophile Records.
You might be asking: What Kind of Audio Fool Was I? to buy a dumbass record like this.
It’s a fair question. Yes, I admit I was foolish enough to buy records like this and expect it to have good music, or at least good sound. Of course it had neither. Practically none of these kinds of records ever did. Sheffield and a few others made some good ones, but most Direct to Disc recordings were crap.
As clueless as I was, even back in the day I could tell that I had just thrown my money away on this lipsticked-pig in a poke.
But I was an audiophile, and like a certain Mr. Mulder, I wanted to believe. These special super-hi-fidelity records were being made for me, for special people like me, because I had expensive equipment and regular records are never going to be good enough to play on my special equipment, right?
To say I was wrong to think about audio that way is obviously an understatement. Over the course of the last forty years, I (and to be fair, my friends and my staff) have been wrong about a lots of things in the worlds of records and audio.
You can read more about many of the things we got wrong under the heading: Live and Learn.
The good news? Audio Progress is real and anyone who goes about doing audio the right way can achieve a great deal.
Further Reading
Pink Floyd Sounds Terrible on this Japanese “Audiophile” Pressing
More of the Music of Pink Floyd
More Reviews, Letters and Commentaries for The Wall
This Japanese Import is one of the dullest, muddiest, worst sounding copies of The Wall we have ever played. It is clearly made from a second generation tape (or worse!).
Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.
And somehow this pressing, or one very much like it, ended up as on the TAS Super Disc List. I would hope that the copy Harry played sounded a whole lot better than this one.
And the CBS Half-Speed is every bit as bad!
How is it that the worst sounding pressings are so often marketed to audiophiles as superior to their mass-produced counterparts? In our experience, more often than not they are just plain awful, inferior in every way but one: surface quality.
Dear Audiophiles, stop collecting crappy audiophile pressings with quiet vinyl and just switch to CD already.
- Hot Stamper Pressings of TAS List Super Disc Albums
- Reviews and Commentaries for TAS Super Disc Recordings
- Records, Like This One, that Do Not Belong on a Super Disc List
Further Reading