Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

Recently we conducted a shootout for yet another superb Contemporary title. We’d played quite a collection of copies of this particular album over the years, on every label, starting back in the 90s when we first discovered how amazing sounding Contemporary records could be when you get hold of a good one.

We felt we had a solid understanding of both the music and the key aspects of the sound we might expect to hear — Tubey Magic, space, dead-on tonality, top end extension, all the stuff we’ve come to love in these live-in-the-studio, all-tube-chain Contemporary jazz recordings from their heydey throughout the 50s and 60s.

However, it’s not the record you see pictured. For now, the title of this album will have to remain a mystery, along with a great many others for which we’ve been reprinting our shootout stamper sheets so as to discuss their meaning on the blog.

As you can see, the original first pressings earned White Hot Stamper grades and were declared the winner of our shootout. With Nearly White Hot Stamper grades, the early Green second label did very well, followed by an OJC with respectable sound overall.

We recently posted a lengthy post discussing the pros and cons of conventional wisdom. In it we attempted to make the case that, although the most common record collecting tenets are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know which standard approach will work for the specific title at hand.

Rather than post one exception after another — easily done, since we have documented literally hundreds of them — we are happy to admit that the standard record collecting rules of thumb work well for most records, with the definition of “most” being “more than half the time.”

That leaves a lot of room for misses, and if those misses happen to be favorite albums of yours, tough luck. Unless…

Unless you know how to test records properly.

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