ojc-all

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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Which Art Pepper Today Is Better: Phil DeLancie Digital or George Horn Analog?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Art Pepper Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written in 2010 or thereabouts.

There is new information about the album as of 2024, which can be found here.

We’d wanted to do Art Pepper Today for more than a decade, but the original Galaxy pressings were just too thick and dark to earn anything approaching a top sonic grade. Thirty years ago on a very different system I had one and liked it a lot, but there was no way I could get past the opaque sound I was now hearing on the more than half-dozen originals piled in front of me.

So, almost in desperation we tried an OJC reissue from the ’90s. You know, the ones that all the audiophiles on the web will tell you to steer clear of because it has been mastered by Phil DeLancie and might be sourced from digital tapes.

Or digitally remastered, or somehow was infected with something digital somehow.

Well, immediately the sound opened up dramatically, with presence, space, clarity and top end extension we simply could not hear on the originals. Moreover, the good news was that the richness and solidity of the originals was every bit as good. Some of the originals were less murky and veiled than others, so we culled the worst of them for trade and put the rest into the shootout with all the OJCs we could get our hands on.

Now, it’s indisputable that Phil DeLancie is credited on the jacket, but I see George Horn‘s writing in the dead wax of the actual record, so I really have no way of knowing whether in fact Mr Delancie had anything to do with the copies I was auditioning. They don’t sound digital to me, they’re just like other good George Horn-mastered records I’ve heard from this period.

And of course we here at Better Records never put much stock in what record jackets say; in our experience, the commentary on the jackets rarely has much to do with the sound of the records inside them.

And, one more surprise awaited us as we were plowing through our pile of copies.

When we got to side two we found that the sound of the Galaxy originals was often competitive with the best of the OJCs. Which means that there’s a good probability that some of the original pressings I tossed for having bad sound on side one had very good, perhaps even shootout winning sound, on side two.

This is a lesson I hope to take to heart in the future. I know very well that the sound of side one is independent of side two, but somehow in this case I let my prejudice against the first side color my thinking about the second.

Of all the people who should know better…

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Kenny Dorham – Quiet Kenny

Hot Stamper Blue Note Albums Available Now

  • You’ll find STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout this New Jazz recording pressed on fairly quiet OJC vinyl
  • We had 12 copies in our 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 — most pressings of this album fall far short of the sound of this Top Shelf pressing
  • It’s tubier, more transparent, more dynamic, with plenty of that “jumpin’ out of the speakers” quality that you won’t find on the average pressing
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness and presence on this copy than anything you have ever heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market (which you can find discussed later on in the body of this listing)
  • 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.”

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Don’t Skip the OJC, Put It in a Shootout

Of the three early OJC pressings of West Coast Sound we played recently, only one met our standards. At 2+/1.5+, the sound was good, not great.

One copy earned grades of 1+/1+, which means the sound was passable. The last copy had an NFG side two, which means it was just awful.

(Many of the Heavy Vinyl disasters we’ve been cataloging lately have earned that notorious grade. The unacceptably lo- to mid-fi sound even the better ones offer doesn’t seem to bother the audiophiles who rave about them, however.)

So does side two of the OJC pressing have fairly good sound, merely passable sound, or is the sound hopelessly bad?

In the case of this Shelly Manne album, all three, and the only way we were able to discover that is by cleaning up three of them and playing them head to head with real Contemporary pressings in a blinded experiment.

Obviously we were hoping for better results from our OJCs — only one of the copies we played will turn out to be saleable.

Why did we bother? That old bugaboo the profit motive was all that was needed to make us give the OJC pressings a try. We thought we could make money on them but it turns out that the opposite will happen. Oh well, nothing ventured, noting gained.

More importantly, we are not the least bit shy about coming clean and sharing the results with our readers and customers, especially the part about three identical looking copies with the same stamper numbers all sounding very diffferent from each other.

An added bonus is that side two was worse than side one most of the time. That happens often enough, but nobody but us ever seems to want to talk about it.

If we had had ten OJC pressings to play, we probably would have be able to find at least one or two with a grade of 2+/2+, meaning that George Horn probably did a creditable job mastering the album back in 1984 when he cut it for Fantasy, to sell for the very affordable price of $5.98. It’s most likely the pressing plant that let listeners down.

Needs Tubes

The problem here is that this title needs tubes, or, at the very least, the sound of tubes, and George apparently did not have them, or enough of them, in his mastering chain.

Our specific notes can be seen on the left. We mention that the first track has the best sound (1956 dates), the rest falling short for being darker and more crude (“old school,” some dating from 1953).

The West Coast horn players are the reason to buy this title, with horns that are “sweet and tubey,” but of course to hear that kind of sound you will need a real Contemporary pressing, not an OJC — or anything made in the modern era for that matter.

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John Coltrane / Standard Coltrane

More of the Music of John Coltrane

  • You’ll find STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this Prestige recording pressed on fairly quiet OJC vinyl
  • For those of you who want the album with the original track listing exactly as it came out in 1962, with sound that could not be beat, this one’s for you
  • Let’s give Rudy Van Gelder a hand, the tonality on both of these sides is hard to fault
  • “…this set of four tunes catches the saxophonist in four distinct moods. ‘Invitation’ finds him trying some of the ideas that he used so effectively with Thelonious Monk in 1957. One of these was the building of contrasting harmonic lines around a single “home” note. It’s a fascinating musical game in the hands of a jazzman as imaginative Coltrane.” – Downbeat

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Wynton Kelly Trio & Sextet – Kelly Blue

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Piano

  • Wynton Kelly’s hard-to-find second album, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage OJC pressing
  • A superb pressing, with lovely richness and warmth, good space, separation between the instruments, and real immediacy throughout
  • Kelly brings in jazz greats Nat Adderley, Bobby Jaspar, and Benny Golson, as well as several of his bandmates from Miles Davis’s sextet, including Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb
  • There are some bad marks (as is sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs) on “Old Clothes,” but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Kelly was renowned as an accompanist, but as he shows on a set including three of his originals and four familiar standards… A fine example of his talents.”
  • “Wynton Kelly demonstrates once again why he has been a major influence in the history of jazz piano.”

Jack Higgins was the engineer for these sessions. He recorded Chet Baker’s brilliant Chet album the same year, as well as many other albums for Riverside in New York in the 50s and 60s.

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A Disappointing OJC of Swinging With The Mastersounds

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

We did a shootout for this Mastersounds title many years ago. It didn’t sell very well so we decided to give it a rest for a decade or so.

Recently we got another couple of copies in, including their other album we used to like on OJC, A Date with the Mastersounds, and found none of them to be nearly as impressive as we thought they were back in the day. Some quick notes:

  • A Date with the Mastersounds

Vibes are dry and glassy. Not much Tubey Magic.

  • Swinging With The Mastersounds

Rich but veiled sound. Just OK, not great.

With that said, we still like the music, so if you see one of these pressings for cheap and you like vibes-based jazz from the 50s, pick it up and discover the music of The Mastersounds for yourself.

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