Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

If there are record companies whose fans are extremely particular about the labels of the pressings they prefer, Blue Note has to be right at the top of that list.

The consensus among record collectors seems to be that the early label Blue Notes are practically guaranteed to have the best sound. In top condition they often sell for many thousands of dollars, far more than we have ever charged for any Hot Stamper Blue Note pressing

We are on record as not favoring early labels over later ones, absent the evidence to support such bias, but perhaps there actually are some records you should be buying based on their labels. This one, for example.

If all the stampers of a title are the same and they’re all cut by Rudy Van Gelder — early labels, middle labels and later labels alike — what do you use to guide you when trying to find the best sounding pressings?

This is precisely the conundrum that an audiophile would be faced with as he goes about trying to find the best sounding pressings of the Blue Note album whose stamper sheet you see below.

This stamper sheet reflects a fairly typical shootout for a Blue Note pressing. It’s hard to find six clean copies no matter what the title is. We probably returned or gave up on half the copies we bought, so we might have had to buy nine in order to shootout six.

(Note that there is nothing on any label after the White B from the 70s. We have never heard any title with an 80s label or later sound worth a damn so we stopped buying them a long time ago.)

Drawing Conclusions

Let’s look at some of the conclusions the typical record collector/audiophile might draw from the information above.

For example:

1.) I have a Blue Note with Van Gelder stamps and it’s decent sounding but I like [fill in the blank with some other pressing] better. Since all the pressings are cut by him, he must not have done a very good job. Thank goodness modern mastering engineer X came along to finally bring out the sound of the master tape that he was not able to do.

That’s an easy one to rebut. The later pressings cut by Rudy are consistently worse sounding than the earlier ones in the case of this title. If you don’t have a big batch to work through, however, you simply have now way of knowing that fact, and therefore whatever conclusions you choose to draw from a too-small pool of pressings are suspect at best.

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