1961-all

Looking For a Top Quality Jazz Record? Skip the OJC of Screamin’ the Blues OJC-080

Hot Stamper Pressings of Excellent Jazz Recordings Available Now

If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, best to skip it.

The sound is dry and bright. It’s passable, but it’s certainly not very good, and even the CD might be better, assuming you are willing to go through a number of discs until you find one that is mastered properly, assuming that there ever was such a thing.

Finding good sounding pressings of classic albums has never been easy. Here are some tips that may help you make more progress.

Original Jazz Classics

Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones. Some are awful. And the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this RCA from 1961

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

These Beethoven “Appassionata” And “Funeral March” sonata recordings have never impressed us sonically.

On the Shaded Dog pressings of LSC 2545 that we’ve auditioned, the piano is too thin.

Who likes a thin sounding piano?

If you have big speakers that can move air with authority, the kind needed to reproduce the size and power of a concert piano, then check out some of the titles we’ve found to have especially weighty piano reproduction.

The sound is not awful — you could certainly do worse — but we do not see the value in this title considering it will be neither cheap nor quiet.

We say pass.

Lewis Layton is clearly one of our favorite engineers, but this album does not seem to be up to his usual standards, or ours.

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Letter of the Week – “Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a copy of Lush Life he purchased not long ago.

Hi Tom,

Even a 2+ [Super Hot] was enough to eliminate the 2021 Concord/AP [Analogue Productions] 33 RPM KPG [Kevin Gray] LP on 180 gram which was my copy until this Hot Stamper.

I listened to side 1 first. Well shit … it sounds clean, it sounds nice, a bit flat but that’s how I thought it was supposed to be, and sounds quite audiophile.

Simply put, the BR copy truly brings the music to life.

Much more vibrance and tonal nuances making for a much more engaging listening experience.

All I know is the BR LP destroyed the above to smithereens.

As always, many thanks!

Michel

Dear Michel,

You are more than welcome.  When you mention that you thought the album sounded clean, nice, a bit flat, you were in the same boat as all the other audiophiles who own these modern remasterings who have been putting up with their mediocre sound. Why?

Because they thought the recordings were at fault.

After all, Chad must know what he’s doing, he’s the biggest guy in the business.

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What to Listen For on My Favorite Things

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

An album like this is all about its Tubey Magical stereoscopic presentation.

If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1961 All Tube Analog sound can be — thanks to legendary engineers Phil Iehle and Tom Dowd — an outstanding pressing of this album is just what the doctor ordered.

What to listen for you ask?

A solid, full-bodied, clear and powerful piano. As we focused in on the sound of the instrument, we couldn’t help but notice what a brilliant player McCoy Tyner is.

This may be John Coltrane’s album, but Tyner’s contribution is critically important to the success of My Favorite Things.

(We rarely care much for Tyner as a leader, which is why you see so few of his albums on the site. Most of his Milestone recordings are terrible, so caveat emptor on those especially.)

Lately we have been writing quite a bit about how pianos are good for testing your system, room, tweaks, electricity and all the rest, not to mention turntable setup and adjustment.

  • We like our pianos to sound natural (however one chooses to define the term).
  • We like them to be solidly weighted.
  • We like them to be free of smear, a quality that is rarely mentioned in the audiophile record reviews we read.
  • Some of the other records we’ve discovered with top jazz piano sound can be found here

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The Search for Lush Life – We Broke Through in 2016

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

We’ve been searching for years trying to find just what kind of Lush Life pressing — what era, what label, what stampers, whether mono or stereo, import or domestic — had the potential for good sound.

No, scratch that. We should have said excellent sound. Exceptional sound. We’ve played plenty of copies that sounded pretty good, even very good, but exceptional? That pressing had eluded us — until a few months ago.

Yes, it was only a few months ago, early in 2016 in fact, that we chanced upon the right kind of pressing — the right era, the right label, the right stampers, the right sound. Not just the right sound though. Better sound than we ever thought this album could have.

Previously we had written:

“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”

We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our best Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.

Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? Maybe there are. If you want to spend your days searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league, a league we had no idea even existed until just this year.

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Neither of These Tchaikovsky 5ths Made the Grade

More of the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

We’ve been playing quite a number of different pressings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 lately, hoping to find a 5th that would really knock us out.

Most have left us unimpressed with the quality of the sound, and in the case of this Solti on London, the performance.

London CS 6117. Solti conducts the Paris Conservatory Orchestra.

The sound is OK. It’s fairly tubey and there’s a decent amount of energy to the recording.

The problem is not the sound, the problem is that the performance is terrible. Our main listening guy said he could hardly recognize the music!

DG SLPM 138 658. Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Phil on an early pressing from 1961.

Big energy and a great performance but the string tone is shrill and smeary.

We are very used to hearing this kind of sound on Deutsche Grammophon records. This is why you see so few of that label’s pressings on our site.

How Did We Figure All of This Out?

There are more than 2000 Hot Stamper reviews on this blog. Do you know how we learned so much about so many records?

Simple. We ran thousands and thousands of record experiments under carefully controlled conditions, and we continue to run scores of them week in and week out to this very day.

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The Electric Recording Company Does My Favorite Things No Favors

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

My Favorite Things happens to be one of our favorite Coltrane records, but we much prefer the stereo pressing of the album. (This is almost always the case when an album has been recorded in stereo, as My Favorite Things was in 1960, later released on Atlantic vinyl in 1961.)

We even tell you what to listen for to help you separate the best pressings from the merely good ones: the piano.

A solid, full-bodied, clear and powerful piano. As we focused on the sound of the instrument, we couldn’t help but notice how brilliant McCoy Tyner is. This may be John Coltrane’s album, but Tyner’s contribution is critically important to the success of My Favorite Things.

The engineering duties were handled by Tom Dowd (whose work you surely know well) and Phil Iehle, who happens to be the man who recorded some of Coltrane’s most iconic albums for Atlantic: Giant Steps (1960) and Coltrane Jazz (also in 1961).

Our last shootout for My Favorite Things was in 2018, not exactly yesterday, but in our defense let me just say that we have done plenty of other Coltrane albums from this period and feel as though we would have no trouble recognizing the sound his engineers were going for.

Unfortunately for those of you who have bought into the idea that the Electric Recording Company produces records with audiophile quality sound, you will find an utterly alien My Favorite Things, one nobody has ever heard before and one that no audiophile should want anything to do with.

Allow us to lay out the specifics of our complaints:

Notes for Side One

  • Big and full but smeary, flat and dull sax
  • No space or depth anywhere
  • Bloated bass
  • A mess

Notes for Side Two

  1. Side two is even worse
  2. Where is the breathy detail of the sax?

Electric Recording Company

We’ve played a few other ERC releases produced by the gentleman who owns The Electric Recording Company, a Mr. Pete Hutchison.

As you no doubt know, we would not be correct in using the term “mastered.” He does no mastering. He does “transferring.” He transfers the tapes to disc and puts them in nice jackets of his own design.

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Robert Brook Reviews the ERC Pressing of My Favorite Things

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Here is Robert’s review of ERC’s mono release of My Favorite Things. MFT happens to be one of our favorite Coltrane records, but we understandably prefer the stereo pressings, which is almost always the case when an album has been recorded in stereo, as My Favorite Things was in 1960.

ELECTRIC RECORDING COMPANY’s Reissue of MY FAVORITE THINGS

We even tell you what to listen for to help you separate the best pressings from the merely good ones: the piano.

A solid, full-bodied, clear and powerful piano. As we focused on the sound of the instrument, we couldn’t help but notice how brilliant McCoy Tyner is. This may be John Coltrane’s album, but Tyner’s contribution is critically important to the success of My Favorite Things.

The engineering duties were handled by Tom Dowd (whose work you surely know well) and Phil Iehle, who happens to be the man who recorded some of Coltrane’s most iconic albums for Atlantic: Giant Steps (1960) and Coltrane Jazz (also in 1961).

Electric Recording Company

We’ve played a number of ERC releases.

In the video embedded in the Washington Post article “In Search of the Perfect Sound,” at some point you can hear me exclaim “This guy makes mud pies!” while listening to the ERC pressing of Quiet Kenny.  I am happy to stand behind that judgment, and I think Robert Brook would agree with me about that.

Here is our review of ERC’s Forever Changes.

Our commentary making the case that these albums are aimed primarily at collectors and speculators, not audiophiles, can be found here.

We have now played the ERC pressing of My Favorite Things for ourselves and will be reviewing it soon.

Other Opinions

As much as we dislike these records, there are some music lovers who are quite pleased with them. A certain JLysaker wrote the following on discogs in 2021 about the ERC records a friend of his gave him (!) (edited for brevity).

I own 4 lps from this label. All sound amazing… The [Way] Out West pressing, stereo, is probably the best sounding LP I own… I also had an AP edition of one of the albums and the ERC pressing was hands down more natural sounding and imaged with greater clarity, and not just to my ears but to that of another buddy there for a listen.

Was it $500 better? I really doubt sonic differences translate into clear dollar amounts, but I would understand someone saying: ‘I’ll stick with damn good.’ Then again, some albums are dear to people and they want to hear it in the best possible fashion, and that probably won’t be through an original pressing — too rare, condition issues, and so forth as pointed out below. So they pop for one of these, as I did with My Favorite Things, which isn’t even a well recorded album.

And I am glad I did as Coltrane’s soprano never sounded better to me, and I have been listening to that recording for decades. So, from experience, these pressings are special. But acquiring them involves serious opportunity costs for anyone not rolling in the dough. And I doubt I ever would have sprung for one if an evil friend hadn’t given me some.

But here I am, feeling neither scammed nor screwed, and quite certain that those releasing these records are qualified to do so.

Others in the comments section were not so positive. Then again, nobody gave them the records and the price struck them as a bit high (median pricing for the album is currently $723.10).

We get similar complaints about our prices, but then again, we’re in the business of selling the best sounding pressings ever made, which is clearly not the case with ERC. They’re in the business of selling mud pies.

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Letter of the Week – “…a trance of ‘rightness’ bordering on a religious experience…”

More of the Music of John Coltrane

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane

Hey Tom, 

The Coltrane I got from you recently is mind-blowing. The texture and tone are something I’ve never heard from him before.

I played the first track (Lush Life) on my super high end digital setup first to set a baseline, while reading through the LP liner notes, and it sounded great. We’re talking a $17.5k streamer and a $27k DAC.

Then I played the same track on your record while attempting to finish the liner notes (with balanced levels etc.). I couldn’t focus on the text for even a minute. It was completely different and totally captivating. I went through the whole of side one (AAA) in a trance of ‘rightness’ bordering on a religious experience, in true communion with ‘Trane.

That’s why I buy Better Records!

C

Conrad,

Your letter makes me sad. You spent all that money on expensive digital playback and you got NOTHING for it but junk CD sound.

How many audiophiles have had the experience you just had? Not many. And certainly not from the typical cheap reissue.

But the cheap reissue kills the originals we’ve played, more evidence that you had a very special experience not shared by even those audiophiles with good turntables. Cheap reissues can’t sound any good! They’re cheap. They’re reissues.

And of course the CD and digital guys are really shit out of luck. They have no way of even knowing what they are missing, right?

Here’s the $64,000 question:

Did you?

No, you didn’t. Not until you played the right record. Then the skies opened up and the scales fell from your eyes.

Those are precisely the records we run into when when we do shootouts and listen for the knockouts. We find records with that sound.

Nobody else can find records like the ones we sell except by luck, and luck is not a good approach to record collecting. (But it can help.)

Enjoy!

TP

Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue

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Should You Collect the Original Pressing on Lush Life?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

Should you collect the original pressings on this title?

Absolutely not. Which means we were way off the mark with Lush Life.

It’s yet another case of live and learn. Previously we had written:

“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”

We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our best Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.

Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? No doubt. If you want to spend your day searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league, a league we had no idea even existed until just this year.

By the way, the mono original we played was by far the worst sound I have ever heard for the album.

By far.

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