Hot Stamper Pressings of Ella Fitzgerald’s Albums Available Now
The first Harold Arlen Song Book to hit the site, and with sound like this it’s going to be very hard to beat. White Hot on side two, Super Hot on side one, Ella is especially rich, Tubey Magical and breathy throughout.
The space is HUGE and the sound so rich. The vocals have dramatically less hardness and the orchestra — especially on side two — is not brash for once.
Huge amounts of Tubey Magic as well, which is key to the best sounding copies. The sound needs weight, warmth and tubes or you might as well be playing a CD.
Hardness and Brashness
Want to know what we are on about with all this talk of hardness and brashness? Easy, just play the average copy. Unless you have been exceptionally fortunate to have chanced upon a properly mastered and pressed and cared for copy, you will hear plenty of both.
It’s one of the main reasons we have such a hard time doing shootouts for Ella’s Songbook albums. The other of course is the poor condition most copies are in. Few pressings do not have marks that play or damaged grooves. The players of the ’50s and ’60s, not to mention their owners, were ruinous on the records of the day.
Which is simply another reason not to expect another top copy of this album to come to the site any time soon. Give us three to five years or so and we might be able to find another batch with which to do a shootout. In that time we might look at fifty copies, buy ten, and end up with five that are worth playing. We obviously wouldn’t bother if the music and sound were so good. (Click on The Legendary Songbooks tab above to read more about the historical value of the music. The sound we can judge for ourselves.)
Stereo Vs. Mono
It is our opinion that the mono takes all the fun out of the Billy May’s deliberately wide, spacious orchestral presentation surrounding Ella. Which is too bad: the mono pressings are five times as common as the stereo ones.