Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Fagen Available Now
We just finished a big shootout for The Nightfly, our first in nearly three years. There is a Hot Stamper pressing on the site as I write these words.
Since we do shootouts throughout the day on four out of the five days of the work week (the fifth is devoted to shopping for records locally by our main listening guy, Riley), there is nothing special about any of that.
It takes us about three years to find enough clean copies of an album like The Nightfly to get a shootout going these days, a marked depature from earlier in the 21st century when common domestic pressings were everywhere, and usually for cheap. Those days are gone and we will never see their like again.
These days we find a lot of Heavy Vinyl pressings mixed in with the vintage stuff we buy, and if the price is right, sometimes we pick up a copy of whatever album we plan to shootout down the road.
In this case it turned out to be the 2021 Rhino remaster on Heavy German vinyl, mastered by Chris Bellman. Or was it?
We of course found it to be awful, as we so often do with Mr. Bellman’s records. It’s lean and recessed. Over the 42 years I have been playing the original Robert Ludwig pressings of the album, I have heard some that sounded that way. I wrote about it many years ago, trying to make the point that when you hear a copy that sounds lean and bright like a CD, what you are hearing is a bad pressing.
The good ones are not like that. They are rich and smooth and even, gulp, kind of analog sounding.
Glossy and artificial, sure, and much too heavily-processed for my taste, but I can live with that sound, even though it’s hardly my idea of hi-fidelity.
Hold Your Horses
Somebody pulled a fast one it appears, as the pressings without the initials CB in the dead wax are not cut by him, even though he is credited on discogs and one assumes on the jacket or inner sleeve as well. The copy we played had no CB in the dead wax.