needle-drops

Smooth Sailing Didn’t Make the Cut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on a copy of OJC 323 and thought the sound was not good enough to please the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we charge.

As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, Smooth Sailing from 1988 on OJC is not an album that would end up being worth the cost associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.

We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding pressings of the album though. If we happen to hear a good sounding one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout in order to make the best sounding copies available to our customers.

As I’m sure you know, 1961, the year in which Smooth Sailing was first released, happens to be a great year for top quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this illustrious group of albums.

Rudy Van Gelder is an extremely talented engineer, one of the greatest of all time. I suspect that the problems with the sound of this OJC pressing were caused by poor quality remastering, something that does not surprise us in the least.

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Roger The Engineer Is Awful on the Early UK Pressing

Hot Stamper Pressings of British Blues Rock Albums Available Now

A hall of shame pressing if there ever was one.

The UK pressing of Roger the Engineer we played was pure crap.

Cool for collectors I suppose, but very bad news for audiophiles.

Your response to this news may depend on which camp you find yourself in. If you love collecting original pressings, we would put you in the record collector camp, not the audiophile one. Audiophiles are supposed to care about sound quality, so if the more original pressing is the one you want, then you are a record collector first and an audiophile second, if at all. Harsh? Let’s call a spade a spade.

Regardless, we ask that you please not buy into that record collecting / audiophile canard that the originals are always going to be the best sounding pressings. The hundreds of reissues listed here prove otherwise.

The original British pressing — true, we only had the one, so take it for what it’s worth — was a poor imitation of what was most likely on the master tape, as revealed by the Edsel reissues.

Maybe you have a good sounding one. We can’t say you don’t.  But we would be very unlikely to spend much money on an original import pressing after hearing this one.

And the domestic records we’ve played were clearly made from dub tapes, so they’re a bust too.

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“Soul” on OJC Is Yet Another Bad Gary Hobish Recut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Recordings Featuring the Saxophone Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on a copy of the album you see pictured and thought the sound was not good enough to please the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we charge.

As far as we can tell, based on just a couple of copies, “Soul” is not an album that would be worth the trouble and costs associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.

We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding pressings of the album though. If we happen to hear a good one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout in order to make the better copies available to our customers.

Perhaps you have a pressing of the record you like. If so, please tell us more about it. You can email me at tom@better-records.com

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The OJC of All Night Long Is Just Not that Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Donald Byrd Available Now

Not long ago we dropped the needle on an early OJC copy of the album you see pictured (OJC-427) and thought the sound would not be good enough for the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we like need to charge.

As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, All Night Long is not an album that’s worth the costs associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.

It was dry and bright. This is a sound a many OJC pressings tend to have. They more often than not sound more like CDs than vintage vinyl pressings.

This title would be more or less passable, even to some degree enjoyable, if it were being played on the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s. However, it would not begin to cut it on the high quality modern equipment we (and hopefully our customers) use.

Don’t get us wrong. We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding OJC pressings of the album. If we happen to hear a good one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout. Based on what we’ve heard so far, that’s not in the cards for now.

Perhaps you have a pressing of the record you like. If so, please tell us more about it. You can email me at tom@better-records.com

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We Drop the Needle on Another Sad Excuse for an Audiophile Pressing

More on the Subject of Half-Speed Mastering

This is an A&M Audiophile Sampler, made in Canada and pressed on Japanese vinyl .

There is a bit of a story behind this title. It’s not the kind of record we normally would buy, or even bother to play truth be told.

A customer had emailed us saying it sounded great. It was cheap so we grabbed one for fun. Our notes read:

  • Sucked out middle
  • Clean and hard (maybe like a CD?)
  • This sucks

Hard to imagine one of our customers liked the sound of this pressing, but I assure you that one of them did, so make of that what you will.

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Andre Previn – These Two OJC Pressings Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Recordings Available Now

The mastering choices of the cutting engineers for these two recordings did them no favors.

Like so many of the early OJC pressings we’ve played over the years, we found that both of these reissues tended to be somewhat thin tonally, with a brittle top end, which can clearly be heard in the tizzy quality of the cymbals.

This is not remotely the right sound for a vintage Contemporary recording.

When doing the shootouts for these albums, warmth turned out to be key to the sound of the best copies.

When the piano sounds warm and smooth, everything else in the recording seems to fall into place.

The OJC pressings of these two albums were brighter and thinner than even the worst of the real Contemporary pressings.

Above all they badly lacked Tubey Magic, a quality the best sounding pressings are swimming in. Consequently, none of them made the cut for our shootout.

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These Beethoven Quartets (LSC 2632) Are Just Okay Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Beethoven Available Now

The Shaded Dog pressings we played were a bit boxy and dry. This is the kind of sound we’ve run into on a number of RCA chamber recordings before.

Which makes it a passable sounding title, not much more than that, and not really not worth doing a shootout for. It’s best played on an old school stereo that can hide its shortcomings.

The much more revealing systems of today, much like the one we used to audition this very copy, simply make it too easy to hear its many faults.

Vintage Vinyl

We are not fans of vintage vinyl because we like the sound of old records. Lots of old records don’t sound good to us at all, and we review them by the score all over this blog.

We like old records because they have the potential to sound better than every other kind of record, especially the ones that have been made and marketed to audiophiles for the last thirty years.

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These Two Return to Forever Albums Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

Pictured are two Return to Forever albums we auditioned at some point — who knows when? — and found wanting (especially at the prices we charge).

Without going into specifics — our notes are long gone at this point — we’ll just say these two albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both, and therefore do not deserve a place in most audiophile collections — unless that audiophile happens to be a huge fan of the band.

My guess is that if these two records are sitting in your collection, they have not been played in many years, if ever. If you own either of these two albums, pull them out and play them. You may find that making more room on your shelves for records you actually enjoy is easier than you thought.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

Having the wherewithal to audition so many records puts us in a unique position to help audiophiles looking for higher quality sound. (Or, more accurately, that small subset of audiophiles looking for the highest quality pressings who also have a great deal of disposable income to devote to them.)

Yes, we have the obvious resources that would be needed, the staff and the budget.

More important than either of those, we came up with a new (sort of) and much more successful (definitely) approach.

We’ve learned through years of experimentation that there is no reliable way to predict which pressings will have the best sound for any given album.

The impossibility of predicting the sound of pressings is something that we’ve learned to accept as axiomatic. As a scientifically-oriented person and a born skeptic, this was a concept I was quick to embrace.

The more time I spend in this hobby, the more I realize it is beyond dispute. Like it or not — and, based on what I read on forums and such, there are apparently a goodly number of audiophiles who don’t like it — it is the undeniable reality underlying the nature of vinyl pressings.

Our Seven Step Program

With that in mind, finding better sounding pressings of any given recording can be achieved by following these seven steps:

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Soultrane Sucks on the Early OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Coltrane Available Now

The early OJC reissues from 1982 of this title are awful.

And whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad, but — I’m guessing, never played one so don’t hold me to it — in the opposite way.

The OJC is thin and bright, and the modern reissue (I’m assuming, based on playing scores of them) is probably thick, veiled, overly smooth, lacking in space and boosted in the bass — because that’s the sound that audiophiles record buyers seem to like these days.

Without the excellent sounding 60s and 70s reissues that we are still able to find in audiophile playing condition, all that we would have available to buy for our shootouts would be the originals. 

At the big bucks those records go for nowadays, shootouts would be impossibly expensive.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job on these later pressings!

UPDATE 2025

We were surprised to find that the right stampers on the new OJC pressings can have very good sound. Click on the link below to that Soultrane has joined the group of good sounding modern OJC pressings.

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These Two Recordings of Michel LeGrand Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Pictured are two Michel Legrand albums we auditioned at some point in the past and found less than impressive.

Without going into specifics — our notes are long gone at this point — we’ll just say these two albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both, and therefore do not deserve a place in most audiophile collections — unless that audiophile happens to be a huge fan of the artist.

My guess is that if these two records are sitting in a record collection, they have not been played in many years, if ever.

Here’s an idea: If you own either of these two albums, pull them out and play them.

You may find that making more room on your shelves for records you may actually enjoy playing is easier than you think.

Our Pledge of Service to You, the Discriminating Audiophile 

We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a free service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.

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