Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now
We described one of the better OJC copies from our second-ever shootout for the Out There album this way:
This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical, yet still super open and spacious.
Admittedly a bit generic, but good records tend to do pretty much all the same things well in our experience, so why complicate things?
Note that the best OJC pressings were dramatically better sounding than any of the earlier pressings we played, the ones mastered by Rudy Van Gelder.
At best the earlier stereo pressing was passable, and the mono original with the blue cover was just plain awful on side one (NFG) and passable on side two. Do you think the old school mono jazz collectors even noticed there was a world of difference between the two sides? I sure don’t.
But the 2016 remastered pressing (according to Discogs, we thought it was 2015 as you can see) puts them all to shame with ridiculously bad sound on side one, sound so bad we didn’t even bother to play side two. What would be the point? Whoever mastered this record was as clueless as they come, and then some.
