Top Artists – Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck – Time In

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  • Boasting superb Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last, this early 360 Stereo pressing will be very hard to beat
  • Big, full and lively, with bottom end weight and plenty of space around all the members of Dave’s classic quartet, this pressing of Time In (the last of the albums recorded in Brubeck’s “Time” series) proves that the engineering skills of all concerned at Columbia in 1966 were as strong as ever
  • This copy allows you to hear the clean, clear, solid, lively, smear-free piano that makes Brubeck’s records from the era such a delight for the analog devotee
  • 4 stars: “Though it is seldom celebrated as such, this is one of Brubeck’s finest moments on Columbia.”

This vintage Columbia 360 stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the audience at the live show, this is the record for you. It’s what Live Jazz Recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

Time Further Out – We Was Wrong Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dave Brubeck Available Now

UPDATE 2023

About five years ago we wrote:

The monos we played in our last two or three shootouts didn’t do much for us. They tended to be thin and hard sounding, and of course much of the space of the studio disappears completely. One side of one copy did well enough I suppose, but my advice would be to avoid them if you’re looking for top quality sound.

Years before we had discovered an outstanding mono copy and described it this way:

This Columbia Six-Eye pressing is THE BEST SOUNDING MONO COPY OF THIS ALBUM WE’VE EVER HEARD! The better Mono pressings of this album give you extra immediacy, more solidity to the drums, and energy like you wouldn’t believe. That makes the drum solo on side two sound OUT OF THIS WORLD. Most copies are congested and veiled, but not this one! The sound is spacious and transparent with wonderful presence. You will not believe how lively it is! 

Both sides are rich and full-bodied with lots of sweetness and extension up top. The energy and transparency are wonderful. The bass is a bit tubby, but that’s what you get on these vintage Six Eye pressings. It’s worth it when there’s as much tubey magic as you get on this pressing.

Fast forward to 2023 and once again we manage to stumble upon a rare 6 Eye Mono pressing in our shootout that had the Time Further Out goods:

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this vintage 6-Eye Mono pressing will be very hard to beat – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • It’s extremely unlikely that any mono pressing will win a shootout, but just to keep us on our toes, we like to put some monos of famous albums in our shootouts from time to time to see how they measure up
  • This 2+ early pressing was the best of the bunch, and it’s guaranteed to beat the pants off any modern Heavy Vinyl pressing ever made

So there you have it. The right mono pressings can sound very good indeed.

Apparently, we was wrong to think we was wrong.

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Dave Brubeck Quartet – Time Further Out in Mono

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Mono or Stereo? Both Can Be Good

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this vintage 6-Eye Mono pressing will be very hard to beat – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • It’s extremely unlikely that any mono pressing will win a shootout, but just to keep us on our toes, we like to put some monos of famous albums in our shootouts from time to time to see how they measure up
  • This 2+ early pressing was the best of the bunch, and it’s guaranteed to beat the pants off any modern Heavy Vinyl pressing ever made
  • These sides are Tubey Magical, rich, full-bodied and warm, yet clear, lively and dynamic
  • This copy demonstrates the big-as-life Fred Plaut Columbia Sound at its best – better even than Time Out(!)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The selections, which range in time signatures from 5/4 to 9/8, are handled with apparent ease (or at least not too much difficulty) by pianist Brubeck, altoist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright, and drummer Joe Morello on this near-classic.”
  • Mono or stereo? Both can be good

Time Further Out is consistently more varied and, dare we say, more musically interesting than Time Out.

If you want to hear big drums in a big room, these Brubeck recordings will show you that sound better than practically any record we know of. These vintage recordings are full-bodied, spacious, three-dimensional, rich, sweet and warm in the best tradition of an All Tube Analog recording.

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Well Recorded Pointless Music from Dave Brubeck

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“Well Recorded Pointless Music” – the very definition of the Bad Audiophile Pressing. In 2010 or thereabouts we wrote the following:

This Direct Disk Labs Double LP is an exceptionally WELL-RECORDED Direct-to-Disc. The bass is punchy, the piano sounds tonally Right On The Money (ROTM) and the recording overall is lively and immediate. It’s one of the better sounding Direct-to-Discs we’ve played lately.

The music goes nowhere however, hence the grade can only be F for Failing.  

Do you buy records to hear good sound or do you buy records to listen to good music? If you’re on this site, hopefully you want both.

There are many records with music that I personally do not care for. As an unabashed systematizer — hence the hundreds of categories and tags of every possible sort on this very blog — I am naturally inclined to have a section for those records, and it can be found here.

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Dave Brubeck – Time Changes

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More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • With a breathy sax, lively and present piano, and a smooth, full sounding orchestra on some of these tracks, this is just the right sound for this music
  • The wonderful sounding CBS 30th Street Studios in New York deliver another amazing Demo Disc for Dave Brubeck and his famous fellow jazzmen
  • Produced by the legendary Teo Macero, this is the fourth entry in Brubeck’s time signature series of classic jazz

Production and Engineering

Teo Macero was the producer, Fred Plaut the engineer for these sessions in Columbia’s glorious-sounding 30th Street Studio. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

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We Happily Admit the Originals of Time Out Are (Potentially) the Best Sounding

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

This time around [2014] no other copy of Time Out could touch our good Six Eye Stereo pressings. They were simply in a league of their own.

If you’ve been with us for a long time you may remember that this was not always the case. We used to really like some 360s as I recall, as well as the original mono pressing. This time around, not so much. 

This time around most everything is different. Allow us to explain.

1. Our stereo is different; we’ve made quite a number of changes to it since our last big shootout for Time Out a few years back. We are strong proponents of making audio progress.

2. We’re different; we have better (I would hope) listening skills. In fact I’m sure we listen for different qualities in a recording than we might have years ago.

3. Even more importantly, we don’t have the same pile of pressings we had years ago. They’re gone, replaced by a new batch. This new batch had some killer original pressings, some good 360s, and not much to speak of on the later labels. 

With a different batch we might have found a great sounding 360 pressing; we have to believe they exist, and we certainly can’t say that our best copy here could not have been bettered in some way. That would be foolish; anything can be bettered.

The next time we run this experiment, the results could be different.

[Update from 2021: we have run the experiment a number of times in the five years since this commentary was written, and the best Six Eye in the shootout has not been beaten yet. Yet.]

For us, in 2014 (and probably through 2015), this is it.

This is the right sound.

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Dave Brubeck – Brubeck a La Mode

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

  • You’ll find superb sound on this very well-recorded Fantasy session from 1960
  • Wonderfully Tubey Magical and natural – this may not be an original, but it sure sounds like a good All Tube recording from 1960 should
  • Exceptionally quiet vinyl throughout with both sides playing Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus – they didn’t press them any quieter
  • “One of Brubeck’s three recordings of the 1959-61 period that featured clarinetist Bill Smith in the place of altoist Paul Desmond with the Quartet, this one finds Smith contributing ten originals that use various modes and unusual scales. The music generally swings and there are some fine solos…”
  • Fans of Brubeck and company should find this well recorded Fantasy title from 1960 of interest

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The Dave Brubeck Quartet / Newport 1958 – Reviewed in 2011

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This is a very nice looking Columbia Six-Eye LP. The sound here is actually pretty good, particularly on side one. It’s open and present, relaxed and natural, with some nice weight to the piano and fairly tight bass. It’s not exactly a knockout, but if you’re looking for a musical and enjoyable copy this one should do the trick. Side two is almost as good, and both sides have been through our extensive cleaning process. 

This is an Older Jazz Review.

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we developed in the early 2000s and have since turned into a fine art.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.

The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.

Not just a good sounding record. A record that was played in a shootout and did well.

The result of our labor is the scores of jazz titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.

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The 45 RPM Classic Records Repress Is Another in a Long String of Failures

More of the Music of Dave Brubeck

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Classic Records Jazz LP.

Not long ago we found a single disc from the 45 RPM four disc set that Classic Records released in 2002 and decided to give it a listen as part of our shootout for the album.

My notes can be seen below, but for those who have trouble reading my handwriting, here they are:

  • Big but hard
  • Zero (0) warmth
  • A bit thin and definitely boring
  • Unnatural
  • No fun
  • No F***ing Good (NFG)

Does that sound like a record you would enjoy playing? I sure didn’t.

But this is the kind of sound that Bernie Grundman managed to find on Classic Record after Classic Record starting in the mid-90s when he began cutting for them.

We’ve been complaining about the sound of these records for more than twenty years but a great many audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them told us we wrong.  If you have a copy of this album on Classic, at 33 or 45, play it and see if you don’t hear the problems we ascribe to it.

To see what we had to say about the 33 RPM version on Classic many years ago, click here.

Maybe we got a bad 45 and the others are better. That has not been our experience.

In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.

Not all of their records are as bad sounding as Time Out. We favorably review some of the better ones here.

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