Columbia 30th

Columbia 30th Street Studio

Dave Brubeck – Time Changes

More Dave Brubeck

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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Miles Davis – Kind of Blue on the 6 Eye Label in Stereo

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides, this vintage Columbia 6-Eye Stereo 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
  • 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 the 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 modal jazz Davis, Adderley and Coltrane were playing circa 1959, this album belongs in your collection.

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Miles Davis / Sketches of Spain – On the ’70s Red Label?

More Miles Davis

More Columbia 30th Street Studio Recordings

  • This excellent Columbia Red Label stereo pressing boasts Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • When you get a properly mastered, properly pressed ’70s copy of the album, it may not do everything right, but it does so much right that we have no problem awarding it a sonic grade of Double Plus
  • The good copies capture the realistic sound of Davis’s horn, the body, the breath and the bite (and not a little of the squawk as well)
  • Balanced, clear and undistorted, this 30th Street recording shows just how good Columbia’s engineers were back then
  • 5 stars: “Sketches of Spain is the most luxuriant and stridently romantic recording Davis ever made. To listen to it in the 21st century is still a spine-tingling experience…”
  • If you’re a fan of Classic Jazz, this Columbia from 1960 belongs in your collection.
  • The complete list of titles from 1960 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

We talk a fair bit about the Tubey Magic of the original pressings below, and those looking for that very rich, very tubey sound may prefer to pass on this copy.

Only the best originals – cleaned properly of course – will give you every last ounce of that sound.

This copy is balanced, open, clear and undistorted. With Double Plus (A++) sound  it has to be excellent, but super Tubey Magical it is not.

Those with very tubey equipment may actually prefer it to the originals. Either way, your satisfaction is guaranteed.

On the best pressings of this masterpiece, the sound is truly magical. (AMG has that dead right in their review.) It is lively but never strained. Davis’s horn has breath and bite, just like the real thing. What more can you ask for?

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Crack The Sky – Animal Notes

More Recordings Engineered by Shelly Yakus

Other Well Recorded Albums that Should Be More Popular with Audiophiles

Both sides are big and rich in the same way that all the best Classic Rock albums from the ’70s are. It has plenty of rock ENERGY; here the sound jumps out of the speakers like practically no other copy we heard.

At the levels it was playing at it was nothing less than a thrill to hear the album I’d known for so long sound so much better than I remember it from back in the day. (Stereo has come a long way since 1976, that’s for damn sure.)

To my mind, speaking as both a fan and an audiophile, both the first two Crack the Sky albums succeed brilliantly on every level: production, originality, songwriting, technical virtuosity, musical consistency and, perhaps most importantly for those of you who have managed to make it this far, Top Quality Audiophile Sound.

This is simply a great album of adventurous, highly melodic Proggy Arty rock. If you like the well known bands that made the classic albums cited below there’s a very good chance you will like this much less well known band’s second album also. Especially if you have the taste for something different — I know of no other album quite like it. It may have been strongly influenced by many of the ’70s Classics of both Prog and Art Rock, but it is stylistically unique.

This is Big Production rock that pulls out all the stops and then some, with a massive Beatlesque string section, horns, synths, backward guitars and every other kind of studio effect that they could work out.

Much like Ambrosia’s debut (another poorly understood band on a small label), such an ambitious project was clearly an effort to make a grand musical statement along the lines of Tumbleweed Connection, Sgt. Pepper, Crime of the Century, Close to the Edge, The Original Soundtrack or Dark Side of the Moon — all albums I suspect this band played countless times in hopes of recreating some of that magic themselves once in the studio. I am of the opinion that they succeeded marvelously.

In the 70s I was a huge fan of those albums too. (Still am of course; check out our Top 100 if you don’t believe me. They’re all in there.) I played them more times than I can remember, with Crack The Sky’s albums spending plenty of time — in heavy rotation you could say — on the turntable in those days.

Fun tip: Listen for the Elton-John-like piano chords on the first track. Can you name that song? (Hint: it’s on Tumbleweed Connection.)

Crack the Sky

I freely admit this band is not for everybody. AMG is correct that the album is not exactly sweetness and light. Of course Dark Side of the Moon isn’t exactly a treatise on positive thinking either. It seems to have held up rather well.

If after listening to the album you feel Crack the Sky is not to your liking, feel free to send it back for a full refund. We want you to be happy with every Hot Stamper purchase you make. Every one is guaranteed to satisfy or we will gladly take it back, no questions asked.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice for how to find your own shootout winners.

Shootouts for this album should be carried out:

How else can you hear this record to sound the way it should?

Based on what were the winners of our most recent shootout, Animal Notes should sound its best:

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Marty Robbins – Portrait of Marty

More Country and Country Rock

  • A KILLER sounding copy with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from the first note to the last
  • The kind of Tubey Magical, tonally correct, spacious sound on this stereo 360 pressing from 1962 is nothing less than an audiophile THRILL
  • The Analog sound here makes a mockery of even the most advanced digital playback systems, including the ones that haven’t been invented yet!
  • If you’re a fan of Marty’s, this vintage record from 1962 belongs in your collection.

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Bill Evans – The Bill Evans Album

More Bill Evans

  • A superb copy of Evans’ 1971 release with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • An outstanding later recording for Bill Evans, superior to many of the albums he made around this time – it’s rich, smooth and Tubey Magical, with an especially musical quality, hence the solid grades
  • Balanced, clear and undistorted, this 30th Street recording shows just how good Columbia’s engineers were back then, even as late as 1971
  • 4 stars: “Although not as distinctive on the electric keyboard as he was on its acoustic counterpart, Evans sounds inspired by its possibilities and is heard in top creative form throughout the date.”

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Dave Brubeck / Countdown – Time In Outer Space

More Dave Brubeck

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • A KILLER 6-Eye original stereo pressing of this wonderful recording, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on the first side and Double Plus (A++) sound on the second
  • Both sides are incredibly Tubey Magical as befits a Brubeck recording from 1962 produced by Teo Macero
  • Superb All Tube sound courtesy of the extraordinary engineering skills of Fred Plaut
  • 4 Stars: “One of Dave Brubeck’s more adventurous albums… Highly recommended along with Brubeck’s other Time recordings.”

Need a refresher course in Tubey Magic after playing too many modern recordings or remasterings? These vintage Brubeck recordings are overflowing with it. Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead-on correct tonality — everything that we listen for in a great record is here.

In addition to the fine qualities outlined above, there was also barely a trace of smear on the piano, which is unusual in our experience for a vintage All Tube recording from 1962, although no one ever seems to talk about smeary pianos in the audiophile world (except for us of course).

Getting The Balance Right

Clean and clear yet rich and sweet, this copy managed to find the perfect balance of these attributes so essential to the sound of vintage jazz recordings. You want to find that rare copy that keeps what is good about a Tubey Magical analog recording from The Golden Age of Jazz while managing to avoid the pitfalls so common to them: smear, lack of top end extension, opacity and blubber.

To be sure, the fault is not with the recording (I assume, not having heard the master tape) but with the typical mediocre pressing. Bad vinyl, bad mastering, who knows why so many copies sound so smeary, thick, dull and veiled?

This copy has no such problems. Full-bodied sound, open and spacious, bursting with life and energy — these are the hallmarks of our Truly Hot Stampers. If your stereo is cookin’ these days this record will be an unparalleled Sonic Treat. We guarantee that no heavy vinyl pressing of any Brubeck album has the kind of analog magic found on one of our Hot Stampers.

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Ray Bryant Trio – Con Alma

More Ray Bryant Trio

More Vintage Columbia Pressings

Another Record We’ve Discovered with (Potentially) Excellent Sound…

  • This 6 Eye Stereo original copy of Bryan’s superb 1961 release offers outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides
  • Impossibly rare on the original label in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces, this superb Columbia 30th Street Studio recording has that “Time Out” sound we love, so spacious and natural
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way you want your vintage analog to sound – the piano is surprisingly real here — solid and dynamic
  • “… one of pianist Ray Bryant’s favorite trio records. Supported by either Bill Lee or Arthur Harper on bass and drummer Mickey Roker, Bryant is typically soulful, swinging and reasonably explorative…”
  • “Ray Bryant ranks this album, along with his Prestige/New Jazz release Alone With The Blues, as his two favorites and who could argue with him: they are both great albums.”

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J.J. Johnson Quartet – A Touch of Satin

More J.J. Johnson

  • A Touch of Satin makes its Hot Stamper debut here with STUNNING Shoout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides
  • Huge amounts of three-dimensional space and ambience, along with boatloads of Tubey Magic – here’s a 30th Street recording from the 1960s that demonstrates just how good Columbia’s engineers were back then
  • Tubier, more present, more alive, with more of that “jumpin’ out of the speakers” quality that only The Real Thing (an old record) ever has

This vintage Columbia 6-Eye Stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs 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 studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue on the 360 Label

More on Kind of Blue

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

  • With seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, this 360 stereo 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, followed by a heartfelt “Good riddance!”
  • 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
  • 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 completely they defiled the sound
  • 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.”

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