Mono or Stereo? Mono!

Ella Fitzgerald – The Duke Ellington Songbook, Volume Two

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Ella Fitzgerald Albums We’ve Reviewed

  • An excellent Verve Mono reissue with wonderful sound on all FOUR sides
  • Forget the originals – like so many of the early songbook pressings, they suffer from painfully hard and honky mastering EQ (and gritty sounding vinyl)
  • We know whereof we speak when it comes to early Ella records – we’ve played plenty of them and found that most just don’t sound very good
  • Exceptionally quiet vinyl throughout* — Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus
  • “Duke’s spectacular catalog dazzles, and his sprightly, lush textures are transfigured under Fitzgerald’s warm-timbred voice and elegant, precise delivery… each tune as familiar as it is delightful to hear in this new context.”
  • If you’re a fan of Ella’s, this Top Title from 1957 belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1957 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

This mono reissue is the only way to find the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s missing from modern records. As good as the best of those pressings may be, this record is going to be dramatically more REAL sounding.

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Julie London Is a Knockout on Lonely Girl

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  • Lonely Girl returns to the site on this original Liberty Turquoise Mono pressing with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • The vinyl is fairly quiet for Liberty in 1956, with only one minor pressing bubble to mar this otherwise well-cared-for copy
  • Julie is in the room with you – her voice is intimate, breathy and Tubey Magical like practically nothing you’ve ever heard
  • For late night listening, this is surely one of the best Sultry Female Vocal recordings ever made – you won’t believe how real the sound is
  • Our last shootout was two and a half years ago, which should tell you just how easy it is to find early pressings in audiophile playing condition, let alone copies capable of winning shootouts
  • 4 stars: “Lone guitarist Al Viola plays gentle Spanish-tinged acoustic behind the hushed vocalist, and it suits London perfectly. While the singer was often chided for her beauty and lack of range, she deftly navigates these ballads without any rhythmic underpinnings to fall back on. London’s intense focus on phrasing and lyrics recalls Chet Baker’s equally telescopic approach.”
  • If you’re a fan of Miss London’s, or vintage Pop and Jazz Vocals in general, this 1956 release belongs in your collection

After hearing this amazing copy in our shootout we felt that it might be a bit too noisy to list, but another scrub cleaned it up nicely and now it’s about typical for an exceptionally clean copy of the album. No marks play — the noise one hears is mostly just the vinyl of the day.

I bought this very record in 1998. It took me close to twenty years to be able to clean it and play it right! (more…)

Julie London in 1957 – Make Love To Me

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More Pop and Jazz Vocal Albums

  • Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout, this original Liberty Turquoise Mono pressing is one of the BEST we have ever heard
  • Julie is in the room with you – her voice is intimate, breathy and Tubey Magical like practically nothing you’ve ever heard, and for that you can thank the amazing engineering of Ted Keep
  • 4 stars: “Julie London’s concise and melodic versions of standards were quite popular during the latter half of the 1950s. Her subtle sensuality and lightly swinging style made for a potent combination.”
  • If you’re a fan of Miss London’s, or vintage Pop and Jazz Vocals in general, this 1957 release belongs in your collection

Thanks to superb engineering and vintage All Tube mastering, this 1957 LP is wonderfully rich and sweet, with a breathy, intimate Julie London performing live in your listening room.

This original Liberty Turquoise Mono pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern pressings cannot BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

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Chet Baker and Art Pepper / Playboys

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More Art Pepper

  • An outstanding Boplicity reissue that boasts dynamic and lively West Coast Jazz sound from start to finish – it earned Double Plus (A++) grades and plays on exceptionally quiet vinyl to boot
  • Both of these sides have close to the best condition grade we give out, Mint Minus – there may not be another record on the site with vinyl that quiet!
  • The label may say stereo, but the sound on both of these sides is pure, glorious 1958 Tube-recorded MONO
  • Bigger and more present and energetic than most of the other copies we played, the horns sound fuller and have more space to play into – it’s the Tubey Magical classic 50s jazz sound, the only sound that ever works for this kind of music in our experience
  • This album was reissued with a different title in 1961 as Picture of Heath — we’ve played both the original and the Pure Pleasure Heavy Vinyl reissue from 2006
  • 4 stars: “These thoroughly enjoyable and often high-energy sides are perfect for bop connoisseurs as well as mainstream jazz listeners.”

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John Coltrane – Soultrane Sucks on OJC

More of the Music of John Coltrane

More Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

The early OJC reissues of this title are awful, and whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad, but — I’m guessing, never played one so don’t hold me to it — in the opposite way.

The OJC is thin and bright, and the modern reissue (I’m assuming, based on playing scores of them) is probably thick, veiled, overly smooth, lacking in space and boosted in the bass — because that’s the sound that audiophiles record buyers seem to like these days.

Without the excellent sounding ’60s and ’70s reissues that we are still able to find in audiophile playing condition, all that we would have available to us with which to do our shootouts would be the originals.

At the big bucks those records go for nowadays, shootouts would simply be impossibly expensive.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job on these later pressings!

And brickbats to George Horn, who seems to be the guy who cut the original OJC pressings. We like a lot of his work, but in this case he sure let us down.

Forgiveness Held Us Back

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 the dramatically better sound I now enjoy 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.

Overview

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.

Those who fail to approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lacks 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 the proposition.

The methods that all of these folks use do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about coming to grips with that inconvenient truth.

Reviews R Us

We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings, and here are reviews for some of the ones we’ve auditioned to date:

To be fair, we may have only had one copy of some of the OJC pressings we reviewed. Perhaps another copy would have sounded better, but we are so familiar with the sonic shortcomings of this series that one bad sounding copy was all we cared to bother with.

It would be hard to justify the time and expense of chasing after records that are unlikely to be much better than the copy we already know to have bad sound. That’s just the reality of the record business. There are so many good records that need auditioning, why bother with the second- and third-rate ones? (We’ve actually played less than 1% of all the newer Heavy Vinyl reissues for the same reason.)


Here are some other records with the same problems as this OJC that you may consider prudent to avoid, including many on premium-priced Heavy Vinyl. At least Fantasy had an excuse for making records that don’t sound good: they were cheap.

If you wasted $65 on a crappy sounding pressing of Stand Up, what else would you feel other than ripped off? Sadly, Analogue Productions does not offer refunds.

Sonny Rollins / Tenor Madness – On the Prestige Trident Blue Label

  • This KILLER Prestige “not-very-stereo” pressing has super sound on both sides
  • Like many other Prestige “stereo” reissues, if there is any left-right information, you would never know it without checking for it with a pair of headphones
  • In other words, this ’50s mono recording has been mastered in the ’60s to sound like it’s supposed to sound – there’s absolutely nothing artificial or modern here, which makes this a very special pressing indeed
  • Again and again the notes read “solid, big and rich,” and that’s the kind of sound fifty year old records give you, in spades
  • “Tenor Madness was the recording that, once and for all, established Newk as one of the premier tenor saxophonists, an accolade that in retrospect, has continued through six full decades and gives an indication why a young Rollins was so well liked, as his fluency, whimsical nature, and solid construct of melodies and solos gave him the title of the next Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young of mainstream jazz.”
  • If you’re a fan of Sonny’s, this is a Top Title from 1956.

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The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds

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Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

  • A Pet Sounds like you’ve never heard, with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on both sides
  • Fairly quiet for this pressing – noisy vinyl is the rule, not the exception
  • Forget whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – if you want to hear the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful album, a vintage pressing like this one is the way to go
  • The Beach Boys revolutionized the popular music of the day with their genius for harmony, and a copy like this has their voices sounding the way they should (particularly on side one)
  • 5 stars: “The group here reached a whole new level in terms of both composition and production, layering tracks upon tracks of vocals and instruments to create a richly symphonic sound.”

Important Details About This Pressing

There have been a great many versions of Pet Sounds released on vinyl over the years, and most of them in our opinion are awful. (The DCC is acceptable at best.) We’re not going to give away what pressing this is, mostly because it took us many years, a huge amount of effort, and quite a large supply of expensive, ultimately rejected pressings in order to finally figure out what version of Pet Sounds sounds the best.

In short, we ask that you please not order this copy of Pet Sounds expecting to receive an original pressing. We’ve never heard an original that sounded better than tolerable, and tolerable is simply not going to cut it for a Hot Stamper, not at these prices anyway.

What you will receive is the only version of the material that has ever sounded right to us, and naturally that means it will be made from the original mono mix. We would be very surprised to discover another pressing that can compete with it.

As per our policy, if for any reason you are not happy with the sound of the album we send you (or the condition, or the cover, or absolutely anything else, that’s our policy and always has been), feel free to return it for a full refund.

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Chris Connor – He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

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More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is back on the site with seriously good Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sound throughout this original Atlantic Mono pressing
  • This copy is bigger, richer, more Tubey Magical, and with more extension on both ends of the spectrum than most of what we played
  • The vocal naturalness and immediacy of this pressing will put Chris in the room with you – more than anything else, it lets her performance come to life
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

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John Coltrane – More Lasting Than Bronze

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  • This superb Prestige Two-Fer offers seriously good sound on all FOUR sides
  • Compiled from two nearly complete Classic Coltrane releases, Lush Life and Coltrane, this collection boasts masterful sound – thanks RVG!
  • Full-bodied, energetic, and tonally correct from top to bottom – these pressings are guaranteed to bring Coltrane’s music to life
  • Regarding the song Lush Life: “Rarely does a single performance uncover the essence of an artist with such aptness. The well-crafted melody is treated above all with dignity, which may be part of the reason it remains flawless.”
  • If you’re a Coltrane fan, these recordings from 1957 surely belong in your collection
  • Another brilliant sounding Two-Fer, proving once again that the right budget reissues can sound dramatically better than anything being pressed these days on vinyl at any price

The jackets for these Two-Fers tend to have some ringwear. We will of course put these two discs in the nicest cover we have available.

This is the kind of recording that makes people revere Rudy Van Gelder. And since he mastered these pressings, we have to give him even more credit for doing the transfer exceptionally well. I am on record as saying that some of his own transfers are problematical. Not this one. Since this has two of Coltrane’s greatest albums together, I can’t recommend this record any more highly.

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Cannonball Adderley / In the Land of Hi-Fi – A Shockingly Good Reissue from Trip Records

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More Large Group Jazz Albums

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) Mono sound or BETTER on both sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy of Adderley’s fourth studio album that sounds this good – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Big Group energy and enthusiasm is key to the better pressings like this one – here you will find the most natural sounding ambience than on a lot of other copies from our shootout
  • This one has most everything going for it, with bass, dynamics, clarity, top end extension and more – it’s a real Demo Disc, make no mistake about it
  • The early pressings we’ve played to date have been unimpressive, so we were gladdened when we chanced upon this Trip reissue and heard outstanding sound
  • Since that time we have auditioned quite a few titles on Trip, but practically none of them made the grade
  • The Speakers Corner pressing from 2000 impressed us back in the day, but one thing we can guarantee you if you take this one home — our budget reissue here will be dramatically better sounding, or your money back

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