Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now
We had 12 copies to play in our recent shootout, all OJCs from different eras — 1986, 2009 and 2020, so if you want to do your own shootout for this wonderful title, you definitely have your work cut out for you.
And may I point out that only one copy earned 3/3 grades, with the next best copy 2/3, and one at 2.5/2.5.
Our Shootout Winning pressing was tubier, more transparent, more dynamic, and had more of that “jumpin’ out of the speakers” quality.
4 1/2 stars: “Cool and understated might be better watchwords for what the ultra-melodic Dorham achieves on this undeniably well crafted set of standards and originals that is close to containing his best work overall during a far too brief career.”
The boxes you see below are copied from the stamper sheet we compiled for the second of the two shootouts we did in 2025.
To the left of the top box would be the stampers for the shootout winner. The box you see has the same stampers and the grades that two other copies earned.
These are the stampers with the potential to win shootouts. That’s why you can’t see them.
The next box down has the stampers for a copy that was Nearly White Hot (2.5+/2.5+).
Note that other copies with those same stampers did poorly, 1+/1.5+. Such records do not have even minimally Hot Stamper grades. We end up selling them on Discogs and such places.
The group at the bottom included a couple of copies that earned Super Hot grades (2+/2+), but only one of the other also-rans would qualify as a Hot Stamper, the 1.5+/1.5+ copy. There were two others didn’t cut it.
None of these were cheap to buy, and out of 12 pressings, five were a bust.
This is the second time we’ve done this shootout. The first involved 8 copies.
That’s a total of 20 records that we had to buy, clean and play.
After the first shootout we felt we still needed to do more research and development, which is why we got hold of another dozen pressings and went at it again, with somewhat different results. (Seems were right about needing more R&D.)
The pressings you see in the box at the bottom of the sheet are clearly not worth our trouble. They cost just as much as the others, but wth grades like the ones you see, we probably would not break even on them once our labor costs are factored in.
But we love the album and learned a lot, so, all things considered, it was worth it. Now we have a much better idea of what is going on with Quiet Kenny.
You can read here about the pressing The Electric Recording Company produced of the album, along with one that Analogue Productions put out. (The short version of our review: Neither one is worth your time, although one is ridiculously bad and the other, while not terrible, is a mid-fi mediocrity.)
