Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now
UPDATE 2026
We reviewed this album in 2014 or thereabouts. It came out in 2007, proving that Chad had learned nothing about the sound of jazz during the previous 13 years after having made his first foray into bad Heavy Vinyl.
Almost twenty years later has anything changed? Not to our ears it hasn’t.
In point of fact, the releases of his records and plenty of others’ we’ve auditioned over the last few years are every bit as bad or worse.
When you’re making a lot of money doing it the way you’ve always done it, why would you ever want to change?
To make a better sounding product? Yeah, that’s a good one. How do you improve on perfection?
I cannot recall hearing a more ridiculously thick, opaque and unnatural sounding pair of audiophile records than this 45 RPM Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl release, and I’ve heard a ton of them.
Surely someone must have noticed how awful these records sound.
So, being an enterprising sort, with a few idle moments to spare, I did a google search. To my surprise it came up pretty much empty. Sure, dealers are selling it, every last one of the bigger mail-order types.
But how is it that no reviewer has taken it to task for its oh-so-obvious shortcomings?
And no one on any forum seems to have anything bad to say about it either. How could that be?
We don’t feel it’s incumbent upon us to defend the sound of these pressings. We think that for the most part they are awful and want nothing to do with them.
But don’t those who DO think these remastered pressings sound good — the audiophile reviewers and the forum posters specifically — have at least some obligation to point out to the rest of the audiophile community that at least one of them is spectacularly bad, as is surely the case here.
Is it herd mentality? Is it that they don’t want to rock the boat? They can’t say something bad about even one of these Heavy Vinyl pressings because that might reflect badly on all of them?
