Top Artists – Cannonball Adderley

Letter of the Week – “Oh my gosh, so much money wasted on magic buttons, secret sauce and dilithium crystals…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Miles’s Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Miles Davis

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased a long time ago (bolding added by me):

Hey Tom,

I imagine you get a little bored with audiophile negativity around the concept of Hot Stampers. I have to admit, they are expensive and I sometimes just can’t push myself to buy (even though I want to). As an alternative I have purchased some of the “new” remastered all analogue classics like Kind of Blue hoping to get great sound.

I listen for enjoyment, but like many folks I get caught up in the hype of technology hoping for better sound. Oh my gosh, so much money wasted on magic buttons, secret sauce and dilithium crystals for a different but really not better sound.

So, to the point, I purchased a copy of Kind of Blue from you about 2 years ago. It was graded by you as A++ – A+++ on both sides. I tell myself this story when I need an incentive and want to buy another Hot Stamper.

I played the newly remastered UHQR KOB. It was quiet, wonderful, excellent.

And so just for fun I decided to listen to the copy of KOB I bought from you.

My Hot Stamper is a re-press from Columbia probably from the ’70’s. The difference between both copies was startling.

My Hot Stamper copy of KOB had bigger dynamics, air, tonal awareness, spatial sense.

Bass, sax, piano and Miles – alive and vibrant. It sounded better. The only negative difference was the vinyl was not as quiet.

My experience with the albums I buy from you has always been satisfying because they sound so good. So thanks and screw all the naysayers .

Anyways, just felt like saying thanks and trying to push myself forward on my next purchase.

Best, Art

Art,

Thanks for your letter. You are our letter of the week!

This caught my eye:

“…so much money wasted on magic buttons, secrete sauce and dilithium crystals for a different but really not better sound.”

Ain’t it the truth. Lots of smoke and mirrors and fancy packaging, but when the record in question is at best mediocre, as you discovered for yourself, we describe such a record as putting lipstick on a pig.

Michael Fremer says it’s the best KOB ever, and will be for all time.

Why can’t you hear what he can?

Seriously, could there be a more absurd and ridiculous statement? When discusssing pressings, this kind of certainty is the unmistakable mark of shallow and banal thinking.  Audiophiles as a group evince far too much credulity and not nearly enough skepticism about both records and audio, which is why they are always looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

They don’t want to do the work. They want someone to tell them they don’t have to do the work.

To presume that there is a clear answer to the question, “What is the best sounding pressing of Kind of Blue?” is a sign that such a person is a True Believer. He is no doubt someone not at all interested in entertaining disconfirming evidence, no matter the source or the strength.

To take it to an even more absurd level, the reviewer in question says it will be the best ever forever. Well, that’s certainly good to know!

Mistakes Were Made

We ourselves used to make mistakes along these lines. We also make no effort to deny the fact that we didn’t know what we were talking about. We made a quite foolish claim in a review from 2006 for Rock of Ages.

The audiophile press may do things differently, but here at Better Records the practice of making “definitive sonic assessments” goes against everything we believe to be true about records: that any judgment we’ve made about any record, good or bad, as well as any knowledge we may think we possess, will always be incomplete, imperfect, and provisional.

However, there is one thing that will never change: our deep appreciation of the fundamentally mysterious nature of records, based on the thousands of experiments we’ve carried out since making that silly statement about Rock of Ages in 2006.

And sometimes, after hundreds and hundreds of observations has led us to believe that all swans are white, we find a black one and have to admit, and not for the first time, that we were wrong. (Well, we don’t have to, but we do, mostly because it mocks the risible certainty of the audiophile reviewing class and their low-rent hucksterism.)

Doing the Work

The “believers” have chosen to buy into this particular reviewer’s nonsense rather than staying focussed and doing the work. What work you ask? Why, the work it takes to find a better sounding vintage copy. (For those of you who are up for the challenge, we advise sticking with the 6-Eye and 360 pressings rather than digging for the 70s reissue like the one we sold Art. The right 70s pressings have especially hard-fo-find stampers, which explains why you rarely see them on the site.)

Art, perhaps you see now that buying remastered records — even those that get raves in the audiophile press — is a fool’s game and more often than not a waste of money, money that would have been much better spent on records that have the potential to sound amazingly good.

And by that we mean records put out by major labels for the general record buying public and pressed on regular weight vinyl.

Those are the ones that can have real analog magic, as your most recent head to head comparison — with a 70s reissue no less — proved once again.

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Kind of Blue – Is This a Good Test Record?

Hot Stamper Pressing of Miles’s Albums Available Now

More of Our Favorite Jazz Test Discs

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Listening to Kind Of Blue. Who needs an equipment upgrade with records like these?

Our reply at the time:

So true!

But on further reflection, it became clear to me that there is more to this idea than one might think upon first hearing it.

When records sound as good as Kind of Blue on vintage vinyl (not this piece of trash), it’s easy to think that everything in the system must be working properly, and, more to the point, reproducing the sound of the album at a high level.

If only more records were as well recorded as KOB, we could save ourselves a lot of time and money, time and money that we’re currently spending on tweaking, tuning and upgrading the various components of our systems. (Assuming you are in fact doing these things. I certainly hope you are. Achieving higher quality sound is one of the greatest joys to be had in all of audio.)

This is undoubtedly true, as far as it goes. But we must live in the world of records as we find it, not the one we want to exist.

Finding good sound for most of the records you wish to enjoy takes a great deal of effort, assuming you are setting your standards for sound at an exceptionally high level. Yours don’t have to be as high as ours — we’re the guys who put their reputations on the line for extravagantly priced Hot Stampers, not you — but the records you are playing have to sound good enough to allow you to forget they are records and just get lost in the music.

With every improvement you make to your system, you eventually will find yourself banging your head up against the psychological effect of Hedonic Adaptation.* Once you have achieved better sound, it doesn’t take long before you get used to it, and now your much-improved “new normal” isn’t as thrilling as it was when you first experienced it.

It’s a common misconception among many audiophiles that if you can make a record like KOB sound great, you must have a good stereo system. Some of them write to us to tell us that the so-called Hot Stamper pressing we just sent them didn’t sound good, which must be the record’s fault since so many of their other records sound just fine.

A certain Bob Dylan record came back to us, twice, something that has never happened before or since. One customer said it just didn’t sound good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper, and another said it was full of distortion.

In both cases, once the record had come back to us, we immediately played it to see where we might have gone wrong. In both cases it still sounded fine. We realized there was something about it that made it difficult to play, but since we were able to reproduce it properly, there was no way for us to even know what that might be. Eventually the next person to buy it found it to his liking and that was the last we heard of it. Since then no copies have been returned.

We’re Devoted

A great deal of this blog is devoted to helping audiophiles gain a better understanding of the vagaries of high-quality record pressings and the difficulty of finding and setting up the equipment needed to play them.

To this end, we have created a number tests to help improve your playback. Kind of Blue is a phenomenally good sounding jazz record. You can certainly use it as a test disk, but only if you go about it the right way, by setting very, very high standards for it.

Rather than play a record that tends to sound good in order to improve your stereo, set up, etc., why not play something that’s difficult to get to sound good? Once you have improved the sound of such a record, then it will be much more obvious  that your efforts were actually successful. (Here are some of the toughest test discs we’ve encountered over the years.)

We live the challenges posed by difficult recordings, not the ones that are easy to reproduce.

If you want to test the limits of your system, here are some difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.

And if you want to buy some records that sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.

*Psychology Today explains one aspect of the Hedonic Treadmill this way:

What are examples of hedonic adaptation?

After moving to a new house or apartment, one may revel in the extra room, the higher ceilings, the improved view to the outside, or other features—only to stop appreciating these things as much as the months wear on. The same could be said for the mood boost we might receive from other new possessions or highly anticipated experiences… such that eventually, their level of happiness returns back to where it started, or at least closer to the baseline than immediately after the event.

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Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans – How Does the ’80s OJC Sound?

More of the Music of Cannonball Adderley

More Potentially Good Sounding OJC Pressings

This is a very old commentary about a favorite record of ours here at Better Records, one I have been selling since the late ’80s, first as a sealed, in-print title for ten bucks or thereabouts, and later as a Hot Stamper pressing.

After hearing nothing that could compete with the right OJC pressing for more than a decade, we recently discovered an even better sounding pressing of the same music. Live and learn, we say. It’s what makes record collecting fun. The future is not yet written.

George Horn was doing brilliant work for Fantasy all through the ’80s. This album is proof that his sound is the right sound for this music.

The DCC Gold CD of the album is also excellent. As with many of the better DCC CDs, it’s proof that Steve Hoffman’s sound is also the right sound for this music. I recommended that Steve consider doing the title on Gold CD — you can see my credit below — and I am glad he found it to his liking. In general, I much prefer the sound of the DCC Gold CDs to the sound of the records they released.

But as some of us have learned by now — all too painfully in fact, having wandered for thirty plus years in the digital wasteland — a CD, no matter how well mastered, can only take you so far. It can beat a bad record, but it sure can’t beat a good one.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Waltz for Debby
Goodbye
Who Cares?
Venice

Side Two

Toy
Elsa 
Nancy (With the Laughing Face)
Know What I Mean?

Cannonball Adderley – Setting the Record for Straight Ahead Jazz

More of the Music of Cannonball Adderley

More Hot Stamper Pressings on Blue Note

In 2010 or thereabouts we had this to say about Somethin’ Else:

The music here is amazing — as I’m sure most of you know, this is as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball himself — but the good news for audiophiles is that it’s also one of the BEST SOUNDING BLUE NOTE ALBUMS we know of!

When you hear it on a copy like this, it’s about As Good As It Gets.

Setting the Record for Straight Ahead Jazz

After doing this shootout in 2015, I would like to amend the above remarks for being much too conservative. The current consensus here at Better Records is that this album deserves to hold three — count ’em, three — somewhat related titles:

  • One, The Best Sounding Blue Note record we have ever played.
  • Two, The Best Sounding Jazz Record we have ever played.
  • Three, Rudy Van Gelder’s Best Engineering (based on the copies we played).

Our shootout winners had more energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space than any jazz recording we have ever heard. The sound was as BIG and BOLD as anything in our audio experience.

Add to that a perfectly balanced mix, with tonality that’s correct from top to bottom for every instrument in the soundfield and you may begin to see why we feel that the best copies of this album set a standard that no other jazz record we’re aware of can meet.

Have we played every Blue Note, every RVG recording, every jazz record? We would never say such a thing (nor should anyone else).

However, in our defense, who could possibly claim to have critically evaluated the sound of more jazz records than we have?

Our Advantage

There are multitudes of music experts in the world of jazz.

For jazz sound quality the numbers must surely be orders of magnitude smaller, and here is where we’re sure we have more than a few critically valuable advantages: better playback equipment, better record cleaning, stacks of copies of the same title, a scientifically-minded approach and, most importantly of all, a single-minded purpose.

All our efforts are in service to only one end, to find the ultimate in analog sound. (Naturally we leave the sound of CDs and other digital formats to others.)

Somethin’ Else Indeed

There’s not much we can say about this music that hasn’t been said (please check out the reviews and liner notes in this very listing). It’s obviously one of the most beloved Blue Notes of all time, and with good reason. The wonderful reading of Autumn Leaves is a major highlight for us, but you could really pick any track here and make a case for it.

We consider this a Miles Davis album as much as a Cannonball Adderley album; Miles picked out most of the material and is a featured soloist throughout. The next album Miles recorded was a little number called Kind Of Blue which we admit to being obsessed with

We had a grand ol’ time shooting out various pressings of this top Blue Note title and are pleased to report amazing sound for this album is not out of reach. We’ve heard more than our fair share of tubby, groove-damaged originals and smeary, lifeless reissues over the years, but this White Hot Stamper blew them all away.

This is a record we could play every week and never tire of. I just don’t think jazz music gets much better than this.

The Best Jazz Record Ever Made, or the Best Jazz Record We’ve Ever Played?

Reviews and Commentaries for Somethin’ Else

Masterpieces of Jazz – The List So Far

I ran across this listing for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else today, a record we raved about after doing a shootout for it years ago. Notice the careful hedging in the phrases with newly added italics:

The music here is amazing — as I’m sure most of you know, this is as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball himself — but the good news for audiophiles is that it’s also one of the BEST SOUNDING BLUE NOTE ALBUMS we know of. When you hear it on a copy like this, it’s just about As Good As It Gets.

After doing this shootout in 2015 I would like to amend the above remarks for being much too conservative. The current consensus here at Better Records is that this album deserves to hold three — count ’em, three — somewhat related titles:

One, The Best Sounding Blue Note record we have ever played.

Two, The Best Sounding Jazz Record we have ever played.

Three, Rudy Van Gelder’s Best Engineering (based on the copies we played).

Our shootout winners had more energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space than any jazz recording we have ever heard. The sound was as BIG and BOLD as anything in our audio experience.

Add to that a perfectly balanced mix, with tonality that’s correct from top to bottom for every instrument in the soundfield and you may begin to see why we feel that the best copies of this album set a standard that no other jazz record we’re aware of can meet.

Have we played every Blue Note, every RVG recording, every jazz record?

Of course not. We would never make such a claim. It’s preposterous on its face.

All Well and Good, But Bear This in Mind

In our defense, who could possibly claim to have critically evaluated the sound of more jazz records than we have?

There are multitudes of music experts in the world of jazz. For jazz sound quality the numbers must surely be orders of magnitude smaller, and here is where we’re [pretty sure we have more than a few critically valuable advantages, to wit:

  • better playback equipment,
  • better record cleaning technologies,
  • stacks of pressings of the same title,
  • a scientifically blinded approach and, most importantly of all,
  • a single-minded purpose. 

All our efforts are in service to only one end, to find the pressing with the ultimate in analog sound.

(Naturally we leave the sound of CDs and other digital formats to others. Although CDs often outperform their modern Heavy Vinyl pressing equivalent — here is a case in point — we know our lane and and are happy to stay within it.) (more…)

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

More Cannonball Adderley

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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Miles Davis – Jazz Track (Reissue Pressing)

More Miles Davis

  • This copy of Davis’ superb 1959 release boasts outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Yes, there is no question that the early Six Eye pressings will always win our shootouts — they can be amazing
  • Nevertheless, we were fairly shocked that this budget jazz reissue from 1973 did as well as it did, with the best copy earning a very respectable two pluses
  • More evidence that high quality remastering was being done regularly throughout the ’70s and ’80s 
  • Davis partners here with jazz greats, including John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and others
  • “… it should become clear why ‘Jazz Track’ is a vital Miles album as well as a testimony to the importance of the movies to jazz–as a medium for improvised soundtracks and, more importantly, as a source of theme music potentially as rich as the music of Broadway…”
  • “It’s doubtful that “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Stella by Starlight” would have caught on without Bill [Evans’] artistry (which is not to take anything away from Red [Garland], whose ballads simply lacked the intricate, delicately shaded beauty of Bill’s pensive voicings on the slow ballads).”

The nine minute plus long Green Dolphin Street that opens side two is nothing short of amazing, some of the coolest jazz you will ever hear, on any record, at any price. With Stella by Starlight and Fran Dance on the same side, that gives you about 20 minutes of great sounding jazz by Miles’ classic Kind of Blue lineup. (more…)

Cannonball Adderley / Somethin’ Else

More Cannonball Adderley

More Miles Davis

  • A triumph for Rudy Van Gelder, a Top Blue Note title, and as much a showcase for Miles Davis as it is for Cannonball Adderley
  • The best sides of this album had as much energy, presence, dynamics and three-dimensional studio space as any jazz recording we have ever played
  • 5 stars: “Both horn players are at their peak of lyrical invention, crafting gorgeous, flowing blues lines.”
  • “…signs of Milesian influence are the calm, conversational delivery of the title track and the newfound lyricism in Adderley’s playing that followed from his nightly experience at the trumpeter’s side.”
  • Reviews and Commentaries for Somethin’ Else

The music here is simply amazing, but the good news for us audiophiles is that it’s also one of the BEST SOUNDING BLUE NOTE ALBUMS we know of, if not The Best. (more…)

Miles Davis – How Smeary Is Miles’ Trumpet on Your Copy?

Reviews and Commentaries for Kind of Blue

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

Listen to the trumpet at the start of Freddie Freeloader. Most copies do not fully convey the transient information of Miles’ horn, causing it to have an easily recognizable quality we talk about all the time on the site: smear.

No two pressings will have precisely the same amount of smear on his trumpet, so look for the least smeary copy that does everything else right too.

Meaning simply that smear is important, but not all-important.

If you click on the above link, you will see that we regularly talk about smeary brass instruments, smeary violins and smeary Classic Records classical reissues.

Pianos are good for testing smear simply because it’s easy to hear when the individual notes blur together.

Nobody else seems too bothered by smear, and one of our many theories about the stereo shortcomings of reviewers and audiophiles in general is that their systems are fairly smeary, so a little extra smear is mostly inaudible to them.

I had a smeary system for my first twenty or more years in audio, so I know whereof I speak.

Our present system has virtually no smear. Any smear we hear on a record is on the record, not in our system.

Any system with vintage tubes — whatever their pros and cons — will have at least some smear. We got rid of our tube equipment a long time ago. Since many of you who are reading this use tubes somewhere in your systems, you may find these commentaries on tubes in audio of interest.

Back to our listening tests:

On track one, side two, the drums in the right channel are key to evaluating the sound of the better copies. The snare should sound solid and fat — like a real snare — and if there is space in the recording on your copy you will have no trouble hearing the room around the kit.

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Miles Davis – Kind of Blue on a Killer ’70s Red Label Copy

More Miles Davis

More of Our Best Jazz Trumpet Recordings

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this vintage Columbia Red Label pressing has Demo Disc sound – sound that’s guaranteed to make you want to take all of your remastered pressings and dump them off at the Goodwill
  • After auditioning a Hot Stamper Kind of Blue like this one – a pressing that captures the sound of this amazing group like nothing you have ever heard – you may be motivated to add a hearty “Good riddance to bad audiophile rubbish!”
  • KOB is the embodiment of the big-as-life, spacious and timbrally accurate 30th Street Studio Sound Fred Plaut was justly famous for
  • Space, clarity, transparency, and in-the-room immediacy are some of the qualities to be found on this pressing (particularly on side one)
  • It’s guaranteed to beat any copy you’ve ever played, and if you have the new MoFi pressing, please, please, please order this copy so that you can hear just how screwy the sound of their ridiculous remaster is
  • 5 stars: “KOB isn’t merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it’s an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence.”
  • If you’re a fan of the music Davis, Adderley and Coltrane were playing circa 1959, this album clearly belongs in your collection

Scores of differently mastered versions have been cut over the years, but to find one that’s lively and dynamic yet still communicates the relaxed nature of this music is a trick that few of them can pull off. These sides did just that.

When the band really starts cutting loose on “So What,” you’re going to lose your mind! The sound is open and spacious with a wonderful three-dimensional quality that gives each musician a defined space. You can easily tune in to one player or another and follow their contribution as the band stretches out.

Quick Listening Tests

This is an easy one. Just listen to the trumpet at the start of Freddie Freeloader. Most copies do not properly reproduce the transient information of Miles’ horn, causing it to have an easily recognizable quality we talk about all the time on the site: smear. No two pressings will have precisely the same amount of smear on his trumpet, so look for the least smeary copy that does everything else right too. (Meaning simply that smear is important, but not all-important.)

On All Blues (track one, side two), the drums in the right channel are key to evaluating the sound of the better copies. The snare should sound solid and fat — like a real snare — and if there is space in the recording on your copy you will have no trouble hearing the room around the kit.

[The drums are precisely where one of the major faults of the disastrous MoFi 2 LP 45 RPM pressing can be heard. A fuller review is coming, soon I hope!}

Next check the cymbals. No two copies will get the cymbals to sound the same, so play a few and see which ones sound the most natural to you. The most natural will be the one with the best top end.

When Adderley comes in hard left, his alto should not be thin, squawky or stuck in the speaker. The best of the best copies have the instrument sounding full-bodied (for an alto) and reedy. The reedy quality tells you that your pressing is highly resolving and not smeared.

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