Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now
UPDATE 2024: As good as the best 70s Red Label pressings may be, it’s unlikely that any copy other than the Six-Eye original will win a shootout these days.
In other words, in 2013 we still had a lot to learn about Kind of Blue even after we had been doing shootouts for the album for the eight years starting in 2005.
Doing shootouts for the album about twice a year, over the next eleven years and roughly 22 shootouts with every Columbia label represented, the data are in, and the right originals win every time, with no exceptions to that rule in a very long time. As you may have read elsewhere on the blog:
We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended we did. All knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.
We regularly learn from our mistakes and we hope you do too.
But we learn things from the records we play not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the ranking for all the records in-between.
We’ve learned to ignore everything but the sound of the records we’ve actually played on our reference system.
This approach allows us to have a unique, and, to our way of thinking, uniquely valuable service to offer the discriminating audiophile. When you’re tired of wasting your time and money on the ubiquitous mediocrities that populate the major audiophile dealers’ sites and take up far too much space in your local record store, let us show you just how much more real handpicked-for-quality recordings can do for your enjoyment of music.
Our Commentary from 2013
This is one of the very best copies we’ve ever heard, and we have literally played more than a HUNDRED copies of this album over just the last five years.
