budg-re-jazz-com

Budget reissue commentaries for jazz records.

In the 80s We Had No Idea How Good the Best OJC Pressings Could Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Baker Available Now

For our first Hot Stamper Shootout Winner. we noted:

Both sides here are Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’ve never heard the record sound better than in our most recent shootout, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing the album since it was first reissued in the 80s.

I used to sell these very records in the 90s — we retailed them for ten bucks back then — but we had no clue just how good they could be back in those days. We couldn’t clean them right, or even play them right, and it would never have occurred to us to listen to a big pile of them one after another in order to pick out the best sounding copies.

This is a wonderful Chet Baker record that doesn’t seem to be getting the respect it deserves in the wider jazz world. You may just like it every bit as much as the Chet album, and that is one helluva record to compare any album to. In our estimation it’s about as good as it get.

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Eric Dolphy – Rarely have I heard a string bass sound better than it does here.

More of the Music of Eric Dolphy

Do the originals sound as good as these ’70s pressings?

Not a clue. Never ran into a clean one in my life.

Rarely have I heard a string bass sound better than it does here. The flute is equally gorgeous. Amazing that they could record a live jazz concert this well in 1961.

Although this is only our second Hot Stamper listing for the album, I’ve known about Dolphy’s legendary Copenhagen Concert for close to thirty years. When an audiophile hears a bass clarinet reproduced the way it is on this record he is very unlikely to forget it.

With the hundred-plus changes to the system and room I’ve made over that span of time the reproduction of the bass clarinet has only gotten more real.

It’s proof positive that everything in audio can get dramatically better with constant effort and attention to every aspect of sound. From the room to the electricity to the right cleaning techniques, everything can come together to make that instrument sound like it is in the room with you, a room that sounds like you imagine a jazz club might sound in 1961.

What a thrill. It’s what we audiophiles live for. It’s what keeps us going in this hobby.

If you know people who used to be into audio and aren’t anymore it’s because they just never got to the point where they were doing it right.