ojc-all

Audiophiles Should Skip Swingin’ the ’20s on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from 1988, but more recently we’ve found the sound of the OJC pressings we’ve played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that plays right into the prejudices of record collectors and audiophiles alike, the kind for whom nothing but an original will do.

They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played. (We tend to like those, by the way.)

The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. 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 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 biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.

You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.

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Leroy Vinnegar Sextet – Leroy Walks! (OJC)

More Contemporary Label Jazz

  • Boasting two superb Double Plus (A++) sides, this Contemporary recording of Leroy Vinnegar’s debut album pressed on OJC vinyl is doing just about everything right
  • The Contemporary LP stereo sound here is completely natural in every respect – rich, warm and smooth
  • Roy DuNann and Howard Holzer engineered some of the best sounding records we have ever heard – here’s a textbook example of what the audiophiles at Contemporary were able to achieve in the studio
  • 4 stars: “…Vinnegar generously features his talented sidemen… A fine, straight-ahead session.”
  • Fans of exceptionally well-recorded West Coast jazz will find much to like on this recording from 1958.

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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.

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Eric Dolphy – Out There in 2026

More Saxophone Jazz

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this vintage Prestige stereo recording pressed on OJC vinyl
  • This copy (the first to hit the site in over four years) was doing just about everything right: it’s rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical yet still super open and spacious
  • 5 stars: “A somber and unusual album by the standards of any style of music, Out There explores Dolphy’s vision in approaching the concept of tonality in a way few others – before, concurrent, or after – have ever envisioned.”

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The Original Jazz Classics Series Got Off to a Bad Start with Concorde

Here Are Some Potentially Good Sounding OJC Pressings

OJC-002! Fantasy’s second release in the series, but not a very good one.

The copy (or copies; who can remember?) we’ve auditioned in the past did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.

The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is not likely to be of audiophile quality.

There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed — but we’re pretty sure the OJC pictured here will always fall short of the mark.

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In the 80s We Had No Idea How Good the Best OJC Pressings Could Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chet Baker Available Now

For our first Hot Stamper Shootout Winner. we noted:

Both sides here are Tubey Magical, rich, open, spacious and tonally correct. We’ve never heard the record sound better than in our most recent shootout, and that’s coming from someone who’s been playing the album since it was first reissued in the 80s.

I used to sell these very records in the 90s — we retailed them for ten bucks back then — but we had no clue just how good they could be back in those days. We couldn’t clean them right, or even play them right, and it would never have occurred to us to listen to a big pile of them one after another in order to pick out the best sounding copies.

This is a wonderful Chet Baker record that doesn’t seem to be getting the respect it deserves in the wider jazz world. You may just like it every bit as much as the Chet album, and that is one helluva record to compare any album to. In our estimation it’s about as good as it get.

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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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Bill Evans / Moon Beams on OJC

More of the Music of Bill Evans

  • This Riverside recording of Evans’s 1962 classic pressed on fairly quiet OJC vinyl boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from first note to last
  • Full-bodied and warm, exactly the way vintage analog should sound, yet as clear and as open as any pressing you’ve heard (or your money back)
  • The first album Evans recorded after Scott LaFaro’s death and it is a deeply immersive experience
  • AllMusic raves it’s “…so well paced and sequenced the record feels like a dream … Moonbeams was a startling return to the recording sphere and a major advancement in his development as a leader.”

Moon Beams is one of the best sounding Bill Evans records we’ve ever played. You can see why we chose it to be the first OJC Hot Stamper of his to hit the site back in 2015.

Play It Might As Well Be Spring for the kind of sublime musical experience you only find on 20th century analog.

(Well, almost. Some of the newer OJC pressings from this century can be quite good too.)

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The Original Jazz Classics Series Put Out a Passable Relaxin’ in ’85

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

We much prefer the 70s Two-Fer reissue (PR 24001) to the OJCs of both Cookin’ and Relaxin’. Previously we had written:

These 70s reissue pressings are practically as good as any we have ever heard. Full-bodied, warm and natural, with plenty of space around all of the players, this is the sound of vintage analog.

It had been a while since we last played the OJC pressing of either album, so we picked up a copy of Relaxin’ and threw it into the shootout, where it did about as badly as expected.

The first side earned our 1+ grade, which means that, like a lot of reissues it’s passable, but really not good enough for a serious audiophile (hopefully meaning you) to bother with, which is why we didn’t even play side two (the N/A you see noted where the grade should be).

The OJC is clearly better suited to the old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s rather than the modern systems in use today. These kinds of reissues used to sound good on those older systems, and I should know, I used to have 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).

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Quiet Kenny Was Quite the Shootout

Hot Stamper Pressings of Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder Available Now

We had 12 copies to play in our recent shootout, all OJCs from different eras — 1986, 2009 and 2020, so if you want to do your own shootout for this wonderful title, you definitely have your work cut out for you.

And may I point out that only one copy earned 3/3 grades, with the next best copy 2/3, and one at 2.5/2.5.

Our Shootout Winning pressing was tubier, more transparent, more dynamic, and had more of that “jumpin’ out of the speakers” quality.

4 1/2 stars: “Cool and understated might be better watchwords for what the ultra-melodic Dorham achieves on this undeniably well crafted set of standards and originals that is close to containing his best work overall during a far too brief career.”

The boxes you see below are copied from the stamper sheet we compiled for the second of the two shootouts we did in 2025.

To the left of the top box would be the stampers for the shootout winner. The box you see has the same stampers and the grades that two other copies earned.

These are the stampers with the potential to win shootouts. That’s why you can’t see them.

The next box down has the stampers for a copy that was Nearly White Hot (2.5+/2.5+).

Note that other copies with those same stampers did poorly, 1+/1.5+. Such records do not have even minimally Hot Stamper grades. We end up selling them on Discogs and such places.

The group at the bottom included a couple of copies that earned Super Hot grades (2+/2+), but only one of the other also-rans would qualify as a Hot Stamper, the 1.5+/1.5+ copy. There were two others didn’t cut it.

None of these were cheap to buy, and out of 12 pressings, five were a bust.

This is the second time we’ve done this shootout. The first involved 8 copies.

That’s a total of 20 records that we had to buy, clean and play.

After the first shootout we felt we still needed to do more research and development, which is why we got hold of another dozen pressings and went at it again, with somewhat different results. (Seems were right about needing more R&D.)

The pressings you see in the box at the bottom of the sheet are clearly not worth our trouble. They cost just as much as the others, but wth grades like the ones you see, we probably would not break even on them once our labor costs are factored in.

But we love the album and learned a lot, so, all things considered, it was worth it. Now we have a much better idea of what is going on with Quiet Kenny.

You can read here about the pressing The Electric Recording Company produced of the album, along with one that Analogue Productions put out. (The short version of our review: Neither one is worth your time, although one is ridiculously bad and the other, while not terrible, is a mid-fi mediocrity.)

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