Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written in 2021.

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An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, the audiophile world is practically drowning in them).

After discovering Hot Stampers and the mind-blowing sound they deliver, a new customer generously sent me a few of his favorite Heavy Vinyl pressings to audition, records that he considered the best of the modern reissues that he owns.

He admitted that most of what he has on Heavy Vinyl is not very good, and now that he can clearly hear what he has been missing, having heard some of our best Hot Stamper jazz pressings, he is going to be putting them up on Ebay and selling them to anyone foolish enough to throw their money away on this kind of junk.

We say more power to him.  That money can be used to buy records that actually are good sounding, not just supposedly good sounding because they were custom manufactured with the utmost care and marketed at high prices to soi-disant audiophiles.

Audiophile records are a scam. They always have been and they always will be.

I haven’t listened to a copy of this album in a very long time, but I know a good sounding jazz record when I hear one, having critically auditioned more than a thousand over the course of the 33 38 years I have been in business. (To be clear, we only sold verified good sounding records starting in 2004.)

I knew pretty early on in the session that this was not a good sounding jazz record.  Five minutes was all it took, but I probably wasted another ten making sure the sound was as hopeless as it initially seemed.

For those of you who might have trouble reading my handwriting, my notes say:

• Bass is sloppy and fat.

The bass is boosted and badly lacks definition. It constantly calls attention to itself. It is the kind of sloppy bass that cannot be found on any RVG recording, none that I have ever heard anyway, and I’ve heard them by the hundreds.

You no doubt know about the boosted bass on the remastered Beatles albums. It’s that sound. Irritating in the extreme, and just plain wrong.

• Reserved. Playing through a curtain.

Very few Heavy Vinyl records these days do not sound veiled and reserved in the midrange.

To get a better sense of the effect, throw a medium weight blanket over your speakers. Voila! Your thin vinyl now weighs 180 grams!

• No space.

Typical of Heavy Vinyl. The studio space and ambience found on the better vintage pressings, the kind we play all day long, is GONE.

RTI pressings are serial offenders in this regard.  We find them uniformly insufferable.

• No transients.

Not the sound of the instruments that RVG is famous for.  No leading edges to any instrument anywhere.

Somebody screwed them up in the mastering. Bad cutting equipment? Bad EQ? Both? What else could it be?

• Boring.

Of course it is. Nothing sounds right and it’s all just so dead.

I would be very surprised if the CD was not dramatically better sounding in practically every way, and far more fun to listen to.

• Snare is hot when played loud like a bad OJC

We’ve auditioned close to a hundred OJC titles over the years. We sell quite a few of them, but of course we only sell the ones that sound good. We are in the good sounding records business. And some of them are hard to beat.

But lots of them have a phony, boosted top end, easily heard as tizzy, sizzly, gritty, phony cymbals and too-hot snare drums.

This record has that phony sound.

We would never sell any record that sounds this phony and wrong. It is an utter disgrace and an affront to vinyl loving audiophiles around the world.

If this record sounds right to you, one thing I can say without fear of contradiction: no matter how much money and time you may have spent on it, you still have a great deal of work to do on your stereo system if you want it to sound right.

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