small-sound

These pressings suffer from sound that is too small.

Is the OJC Pressing of Jazz Giant Really 100x Worse?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary is from many years ago. The OJC’s can be decent on this title, but some of them, like the one we played and discuss here from way back when, can be awful sounding.

However, we played a copy of OJC-167 in our most recent 2026 shootout. It earned grades of 1+/1.5+, almost good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper, which simply means it has the potential to be decent but, based on our experience, you are more likely to get a bad one than a good one.

Our notes in 2026 read:

  • Veiled and dry
  • Not natural

Still, not a bad sounding copy, better than nine out of ten Heavy Vinyl pressings we play these days. They rarely earn even one plus.

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Strawberry Studios Dropped the Ball When They Mastered This One

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis Costello’s Albums Available Now

We described a Shootout Winning Hot Stamper pressing of Armed Forces we listed not long ago this way:

This vintage UK pressing will show you just how good sounding Elvis’s best recording can be, with a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one.

It’s some of the biggest, boldest rock sound ever recorded. A Top 100 Demo Disc – every track is Elvis at his best.

Armed Forces is one of the best-sounding rock records ever made, and a copy like this is proof enough to back up that claim. The better copies are extremely transparent and silky sounding, but with unbelievably punchy, rock-solid bass and drums.

I would say the sound of the rhythm section of this album ranks up there with the very best ever recorded. Beyond that, the musical chops of this band at this time rank with the very best in the history of rock. Steve, Bruce and Pete rarely get the credit they deserve for being one of the tightest, liveliest backing bands ever to walk into a studio or on to a stage.

All true, if you happen to be playing the right UK pressing. The ones with Strawberry in the dead wax on side one, however, are not remotely competitive with the best pressings we played in our last shootout, as you can easily see from the stamper sheet below.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Armed Forces can be on the best vintage pressings.

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The Absolute Sound Thinks this Is Some Kind of Super Disc?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now

Is there something “super” about it?

If there is we sure as hell missed it!

We described one of the better OJC copies from our second-ever shootout for Dolphy’s Out There album this way:

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.

Admittedly somewhat generic, but good records tend to do pretty much all the same things well in our experience, so why complicate things unnecessarily?

Note that the best OJC pressings were dramatically better sounding than any of the earlier pressings we played, the ones mastered by Rudy Van Gelder.

At best the earlier stereo pressing was passable, and the mono original with the blue cover was just plain awful on side one (NFG) and passable on side two. Do you think the old school mono jazz collectors even noticed there was a world of difference between the two sides? I sure don’t.

But the 2016 remastered pressing (according to Discogs, we thought it was 2015 as you can see) puts them all to shame with ridiculously bad sound on side one, sound so bad we didn’t even bother to play side two. What would be the point? Whoever mastered this record was as clueless as they come, and then some.

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Some OJC Pressings of Waltz for Debby Can Be Pretty Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bill Evans Available Now

During our most recent shootout for Waltz for Debby, we took the opportunity to play the early OJC that first came out in the 80s. We found the OJC pressings with the stampers identified below had good, not great sound.

I remember playing the Analogue Productions version from 1992, mastered by Doug Sax, and being shocked at how overly rich, murky, thick and unnatural it sounded. I knew the AP Way Out West was bad. Was every title that Analogue Productions remastered going to sound like it was being played by 50’s JBL speakers powered by Mac 30s?

This was the sound audiophiles had always wanted? This was the sound that made them think they were listening to the master tape? (To prove that bad ideas never die — that sooner or later they return in a different guise — there is a Mr. Hutchison who makes records that sound very similar to those Chad was making in the early 90s. The more things change…)

Back to the OJC of Waltz for Debby. A local fellow who had requested my 1990s catalog, the one in which I say the OJCs just kill the new AP Heavy Vinyl pressings, came over and bought some OJCs, the ones I thought sounded very good, which were the only ones we carried. They were all of  ten bucks each.

He promptly went home, played them and called me to tell me just how awful his AP vinyl of the album sounded and how much better his OJC was in comparison, at less than half the price. I’m sure I said something along the lines of “Tell me something I don’t know!” My credibility established beyond all doubt, he and I soon became fast friends.

I never reviewed the Waltz for Debby on AP, but I wrote reviews for three other AP titles: Way Out West, Chet, and Jazz Giant. Spoiler alert: I thought all three were unbelievably awful.

The G1A/B1 OJC pressing we played suffered these problems:

  • It’s opaque but not too opaque
  • It’s small and a bit dull

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Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 2 / Bachauer (SR-90301)

Hot Stamper Pressings of of the Music of Brahms Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this recording using a single early pressing back in 2012. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then.

We reviewed this recording using a single early pressing back in 2012. We don’t do things like that anymore, but we have to admit that we often did things that way back then.

Until about twenty years ago we had no idea how incomplete and inadequate our understanding of any title would turn out to be with only a single copy on hand.  When we began doing shootouts in 2004, immediately it became obvious that only a stack of cleaned pressings allowed us to recognize what a recording’s strengths and weaknesses might be.

More to the point, it offered us the opportunity to clearly identify the best record in the group — the pressing whose superior sound quality stood above the others.

These “record experiments” taught us many important lessons. The process of playing copy after copy of the same record and noting the differences we heard made us better listeners.

Through this work, carried out over the course of many years, we learned that there was only one way to find better sounding records. Everything else is a guess, just like our review of the record above was a guess.

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Love’s Debut and Forever Changes on Heavy Vinyl – Indefensible Dreck from Sundazed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Love Available Now

Two audiophile hall of shame titles, and another two Sundazed records reviewed and found seriously wanting.

We got hold of a minty original pressing of the first Love album back around 2007, so in preparation for the commentary I pulled one of the Sundazed pressings off the shelf, (Forever Changes, the only one we ever bothered to sell), cracked it open and threw it on the turntable. 

Gag, what a piece of crap. When I had auditioned them all those years ago (2002), it was — I’m not kidding — the best of the bunch.

The sound to me back then was nothing special, but not bad. Knowing how rare the originals were, we gave it a lukewarm review and put it in the catalog, the single Sundazed Love album that (just barely) made the cut.

Now I wish I hadn’t, because no one should have to suffer through sound that bad. Here’s what I wrote for the shootout:

You’d never know it from those dull Sundazed reissues, but the right pressings of Love albums are full of Tubey Magic! With Bruce Botnick at the controls you can expect a meaty bottom end and BIG rock sound, and this recording really delivers on both counts.

With Sundazed mastering engineers running the show, you can expect none of the above.

No Tubey Magic, no meaty bottom end, no big rock sound.

After the shootout, I took the two copies we had in stock right down to my local record store and traded them in.

I didn’t want them in my house, let alone on my site.

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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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Getz Au Go Go on Polygram – Isn’t This Record Supposed to Be Stereo?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Bossa Nova Albums Available Now

As part of our recent [probably from 2011] shootout for the album, one of the pressings we played was a later reissue, most likely from the late 70s or early 80s.   

As a general rule we make a point to go out of our way to play practically any copy we can get our hands on, in the off chance that a reissue will beat the original. It’s happened plenty of times. Those of you with White Hot Stamper shootout winning copies of some of our favorite titles know what I’m talkin’ about.

Imagine our surprise when this pressing — in a stereo jacket, with a label with the word “stereo” printed right on it — turned out to be dead MONO.

The sound was godawful — small, flat, and bereft of the ambience that makes this recording so enjoyable. The same would probably be true for the mono originals, but since I haven’t played one of those in decades I will just say that that would be no more than a guess, albeit an educated one.

Yet another reason not to believe a word you read on an album jacket or label.

A public service from your record loving audiophile friends here at Better Records. (more…)

Does Year of the Cat on Mobile Fidelity Have Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Stewart Available Now

Our answer, judging by the copy we played not long ago, would be solidly in the negative. The final grade we awarded both sides was No, our way of saying the record is Not Good.

Below is a description for what a top copy of the album sounds like, based on our most recent shootout:

Incredible sound throughout this vintage Janus pressing of Stewart’s 1976 Masterpiece. With engineering by Alan Parsons, the top pressings are every bit the audiophile Demo Discs you remember. The best sides have sweet vocals, huge amounts of space, breathtaking transparency, and so much more.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

But if you own the wrong Mobile Fidelity pressing — this one was reissued in 1981, the original came out in 1978, so there may be some other pressings that sound better than this one — you would never know how good sounding the album can be. We put a copy we had laying around in a shootout recently and the results were, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty painful.

As the notes make clear, the Mobile Fidelity pressing, with the stampers you see on the sheet above, is:

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The Original Jazz Classics Series Put Out a Passable Relaxin’

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Miles Davis Available Now

We much prefer the right version of the 70s Two-Fer reissue (PR 24001) to the OJCs of both Cookin’ and Relaxin’ (OJC-190). 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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