Top Artists – Wynton Kelly

Miles Davis – In Person: Saturday Night At The Blackhawk, Volume II

More Miles Davis

More Live Recordings of Interest

  • This superb 6-Eye Stereo pressing boasts relaxed, full bodied, three-dimensional Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish
  • Both of these sides are huge, spacious, lively, transparent and above all real – you won’t believe how good the live sonics captured on this album is (until you play it anyway)
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Davis himself has never played with more intensity and muscularity on record than he does here. Miles fans will need both [sets] to fully appreciate how special this engagement with this particular band was.”

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John Coltrane – Coltrane Jazz

More John Coltrane

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

  • Both sides of this copy have excellent sound for Coltrane’s brilliant sixth studio album, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades
  • This pressing captures the classic Coltrane sound that Tom Dowd and Phil Iehle achieved in the studio in 1961, with plenty of the Tubey Magic that makes a vintage jazz album like this one such a special listening experience
  • It’s the rare pressing that isn’t mediocre if not outright awful – it took us a long time to find the right stampers for this one
  • It’s trial and error, no more, no less, a process that worked for plenty of other hard-to-find-good-sound-for Coltrane albums too
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The first album to hit the shelves after Giant Steps… While not the groundbreaker that Giant Steps was, Coltrane Jazz was a good consolidation of his gains as he prepared to launch into his peak years of the 1960s.”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1961 that belongs in any jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1961 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick.

This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.

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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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Miles Davis – Someday My Prince Will Come

More Miles Davis

More Vintage Columbia Hot Stamper Pressings

  • An outstanding copy of this Miles Davis classic, with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • This original Columbia 6-Eye stereo LP is full-bodied, high-rez and spacious, with Miles’ horn uncannily present, a sound you just cannot find on Heavy Vinyl no matter who makes it
  • If you have the big system and dedicated room a record of this quality demands, you can put Miles right in the room with you with a Hot Stamper pressing as good as this
  • Vintage pressings that play this reasonably quiet and are free of scratches (minor noted issue below notwithstanding) and groove damage are few and far between, but here’s one, perfect for even the most demanding audiophile
  • Another engineering triumph for Fred Plaut at Columbia’s legendary 30th Street Studios – the man is a genius
  • Musically this is one of our very favorite Miles albums, and the sound is Demo Disc Quality on the better copies
  • If you’re a jazz fan, this Must Own Title from 1961 belongs in your collection

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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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Miles Davis / In Person – Friday and Saturday Nights

More Miles Davis

More of Our Best Jazz Trumpet Recordings

  • This 2-LP Six-Eye Stereo pressing boasts relaxed, full bodied, three-dimensional Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on sides two and three, and excellent Double Plus (A++) sound on sides one and two
  • These four sides are huge, spacious, lively, transparent and above all real – you won’t believe how good the live sound captured on this album is (until you play it anyway)
  • If you want to hear a healthy dose of the Tubey Magic, size and energy of these wonderful sessions, recorded at the Blackhawk in April 1961, this copy will let you do that
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Though short-lived, the unique character of this group was its sheer intensity and diversity of attack. Because of the departure of Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, Davis had to rely as much on a muscular attack in playing his instrument as his considerable gift for melodic improvisation. For his part, Mobley had the shoes of two monster players to fill, and he does so elegantly with a ton of fire in his playing. But it is Kelly and Chambers who really set the pace for this band.”
  • If you’re a jazz fan, this classic title from 1961 belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1961 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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Miles Davis / In Person – Friday Night

More Miles Davis

More of Our Best Jazz Trumpet Recordings

  • This early 6-Eye Stereo pressing had the big, rich, transparent and real sound we were looking for, earning outstanding Double Plus (A++) sonic grades on both sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • If you want to hear a healthy dose of the Tubey Magic, size and energy of this wonderful live session, the first of two recorded at the Blackhawk in April 1961, this copy will let you do that
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The first of two sets recorded during a weekend in 1961 features the Miles Davis Quintet at a period of time when Hank Mobley was on tenor and the rhythm section was comprised of pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. This is an underappreciated group because of its relatively short life, but as evidenced here, the bandmembers swung fast and hard and never looked back.”

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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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MoFi Misses The Mark by a M I L E with Kind Of Blue

Reviews and Commentaries for Kind of Blue

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he wrote recently for one of our favorite records, Kind of Blue. (To be clear, we love the album, just not the MoFi pressing of it.)

MoFi Misses The Mark by a M I L E w/ Kind Of Blue

One of our other good customers had this to say about the Mobile Fidelity pressing:

Last night I listened to my 2015 Mobile Fidelity 45 RPM pressing.

I couldn’t get through the first cut.

Closed, muffled and flat as a pancake. No life or energy whatsoever.

I agreed and added my two cents:

My notes for their pressing read:

  • Thick, dark, flat.
  • Lacks air, space, presence.
  • Not a bad sound but it’s not right.

Later I added:

Having listened to the record more extensively, I see now I was being much too kind.

A longer review will be coming soon I hope. I think I may know why some audiophiles like the sound of this record, and will be exploring that notion in a future commentary.

The last line about the MoFi not having “a bad sound but it’s not right” reminded me of of the mistakes I made in my original review of Santana’s first album on MoFi: Santana on MoFi – we owe you an apology

Kind of Blue is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it.

Some highlights include:

Kind of Blue checks a lot of boxes for us here at Better Records.

  1. It’s a core jazz title, one that belongs in any serious audiophile’s record collection
  2. It’s a jazz masterpiece
  3. It’s a personal favorite
  4. It was recorded by one of the greats, Fred Plaut
  5. It was produced by another one of the greats, Teo Macero
  6. It was recorded at Columbia’s famed 30th street studio