re-processed

Out of Our Heads – Mono or Reprocessed Stereo?

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

On this London LP, even though it states clearly on the cover that the record is electronically re-processed into stereo, the songs we heard on side one were in dead mono.

So much for believing what you read on album covers.

This Sonny Rollins pressing of Tenor Madness says it too has been remastered into stereo, but you would have a hard time hearing any left-right information coming from your speakers. On headphones, maybe, but speakers? Unlikely.

Even when a record has been been reprocessed from mono into stereo, it can still sound very good. Not the best, mind you, but good enough to easily wipe the floor with anything pressed by any audiophile label that we’ve ever heard of, and we’ve heard of pretty much all of them.

More on the subject of mono versus stereo.

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Soultrane – Supposedly Reprocessed into Stereo, But Was It Really?

More of the Music of John Coltrane

It may say stereo on the cover, but this album is pure, glorious MONO, with sound that is full-bodied, relaxed, Tubey Magical and tonally correct.

This is a mono recording that has supposedly been reprocessed into stereo. Rudy Van Gelder did the mastering, and my guess is he decided to leave the sound mono and simply not tell anyone. Who can blame him? He engineered it in mono, so why fix what ain’t broke just because the label decided to print the cover and the label with the word “stereo” in order to generate more sales?

We’re lucky he did. The early OJC reissues of this title are awful, and whatever Heavy Vinyl they’re churning out these days is probably every bit as bad.

Without these excellent ’60s and ’70s reissues, all that we would have available to do our shootouts would be the originals.

At one to three thousand dollars each for clean copies, few of which could ever be found anyway, that makes for a shootout whose costs could never be justified.

So our thanks go to Rudy for doing a good job!

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