Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now
More Stamper and Pressing Information Like This
Some Like It Hot badly needed to be made using tubes in the mastering chain, but that didn’t happen.
It’s another case of an OJC with zero Tubey Magic. You might as well be playing the CD. I would bet money it sounds just like this record. Maybe even better.
I suppose if you have a super-tubey phono stage, preamp or amp (like the Mac 30 you see nearby), you might be able to supply some of the Tubey Magic missing from this pressing, but then all your properly mastered records wouldn’t sound right, now would they?
We had two copies of the OJC and one of them did better than this one. It earned a Super Hot grade for one side. If you see this OJC pressing in your local record store, avoid these stampers. The sound isn’t awful, but it’s not very good either, especially considering how amazing the tapes must be, based on the sound of our White Hot Stamper shootout winner.
The OJC pressing of this album is much better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s than the modern systems of today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I had an old school stereo and some of the records I used to think sounded good back in the day don’t sound too good to me anymore (although this one never did).
The OJC pressings of Some Like It Hot are thinner and brighter than even the worst of the later pressings we’ve auditioned. That is decidedly not our sound. It’s not the sound Roy DuNann was famous for, and we don’t like it either, although we have to admit that we did find the sound of many of these OJC pressings more tolerable — even enjoyable — in the past.
Our old system from the 80s and 90s was tubier, tonally darker and dramatically less revealing, which strongly worked to the advantage of leaner, brighter, less Tubey Magical titles such as this one. Pretty much everybody I knew had a system that suffered from those same afflictions.
Like most audiophiles, I thought my stereo sounded great.
And the reality is that no matter how hard I worked or how much money I spent, I would never have been able to achieve top quality sound for one simple reason: most of the critically important revolutionary advances in audio had not yet come to pass.
It would take many technological improvements and decades of effort until I would have anything like the system I do now.
Overview
Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large enough sample.
Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their lack of rigor, among other things, when comparing pressings.
Those who approach the problem of finding top quality pressings with an utter lack of seriousness can be found on every audiophile forum there is. The youtubers are the worst, but are the self-identified aristocrats of audio any better? I see no evidence to support the proposition for or against. None of them seem to know what they are talking about.
The methods that all of these folks have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about learning that inconvenient truth.
Want to find your own top quality copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
Qualified Reviews
We’ve easily played more than a hundred OJC pressings in the 37 years we’ve been in the record business. Here are reviews for some of the ones we’ve auditioned to date:
