Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cannonball Adderley Available Now
Soon after the album was released in 2000, we wrote the following short review (three words!) in our catalog:
“Outstanding! Top recommendation!”
Ten years or so later, we added this caveat:
A fairly good Speakers Corner jazz album. Hard to know what we would think of this pressing today, but for the thirty bucks you might pay for it, it’s probably worth a listen.
Well, we recently got one in and gave it that listen. Shockingly, it has held up fairly well for a Heavy Vinyl pressing.
With the mono switch out (inactive) on the EAR 324P, we noted:
Big, loose bass.
Horns are rich and nice but veiled.
With the mono switch in (active), the sound is a bit less veiled but not too different.
It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with a grade of 1.5+, it might qualify for our good, not great sounding LPs section, depending on how side two sounds. We didn’t play side two because 1.5+ is not a grade that makes us want to put any more time into it. It’s our lowest Hot Stamper grade, and it barely qualified for it, meaning there is a good chance that the next one could be 1+ and not worth anybody’s trouble.
The right vintage pressings are a big step up in class sonically, but boy are they hard to find in clean condition. We’ve tried for years and don’t have much to show for our efforts yet.
At a cheap price it’s not a bad record, depending on how you feel about the midrange being veiled.
I can’t stand that sound myself, but since a very large percentage of Heavy Vinyl pressings that we’ve auditioned over the years have suffered from that problem to one degree or another, I guess other music lovers and audiophiles feel differently. (This link will take you to some of the other records we’ve reviewed with veiled sound.)
The average copy on Discogs sells for $29.10. That seems like a decent price for a decent-sounding record.