squawky-sound

Hawkins! Alive! on Classic Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Live Jazz Club Recordings Available Now

This title is yet another audiophile hall of shame pressing. It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I had a less-than-revealing tube system in the 90s, but even that system, as limited as it was, would have had a hard time hiding the faults of this awful pressing.

The copy of the Classic I auditioned back in 1995 had Hawkin’s horn sounding squawky and sour.

Why does Rudy Van Gelder get called out for that sound but Bernie Grundman never does? It’s the same sound!

As a result of our thumbs down judgment, we made a point not to carry this title. We were selling lots of other Classic Records at the time of course. Looking back on those days from where we are now, to us that means that our standards were not very high. But we sure thought they were at the time. 

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

If you don’t think the major audiophile labels had anything but contempt for their customers , play this pressing and see for yourself the kind of garbage they were happy to pawn off on the audiophile “community.”

Speaking of the audiophile community, was there ever such a thing?

There is now of course, Hoffman’s being the most popular. On his forum you will find self-described audiophiles defending the indefensible at every turn. I am happy to report that the threads mentioning — sorry, I meant to say bashing — Hot Stampers are some of the most popular.

I liked many of Classic’s other jazz titles — they did a better job with jazz than any other kind of music — but this was not their finest hour.  Unless I got a bad copy, always a possibility.

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Leftoverture – “…a certain ‘squawky, pinched’ sound to the guitars…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Arty Rock Albums Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity.

This copy of Kansas’ most consistent album, their masterpiece I might venture to say, has an OFF THE CHARTS A+++ side two! This copy shows you the ROCK album they actually recorded. The average copy of Leftoverture only hints at the power of the band.

Side two just KILLED from start to finish, with the deepest, punchiest bass, moving up the frequency ladder to the clearest sweetest mids, and following it all the way to the top with the most extended grain-free, silky highs.

Most copies, like so many rock records from the era, are veiled and smeary. Often they lack extension at one or both ends of the frequency spectrum, more often than not up top, which results in harshness and shrillness, not the sound you want on a Kansas record.

But copies such as this one show you the kind of sound that is possible with Leftoverture. It is, in a word, SMEAR-FREE, with superb transients, textures and clarity that are the natural result of getting every last bit of musical information into the grooves.

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There’s a Very Good Chance We Were Wrong about Mulligan Meets Getz

More of the Music of Stan Getz /More of the Music of Gerry Mulligan

This is an album that we were probably wrong about in 2021 when the following Hot Stamper two-pak pressing went up for sale on the site. (The pressings we liked at the time are long gone by now.) Here is what we wrote back then:

Mulligan and Getz’s 1957 collaboration arrives on the site with this superb 2-pack offering Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner

Full, rich, and spacious with tons of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory

Practically impossible to find in stereo with audiophile playing surfaces – it took two different pressings to get two good sides, and they are very good indeed

The reissues we discovered in 2025 trounced the originals (in both stereo and mono) as well as the early reissues (on the Verve T Label) we played in our shootout, as you can see from the stamper sheet notes below:

Our mistaken judgment is simply the result of ignorance. In 2021 we simply had no idea just how good this recording could sound on vintage vinyl. We hadn’t done our homework properly, and because of that we came up with the wrong answer.

We only discovered the right pressings, with the right stampers, pressed in the right era, and mastered by the right guy, sometime in 2024 or so. We bought a bunch of those and in 2025 did the shootout with all kinds of copies, just to keep everybody honest.

That was the year much better sounding reissue copies that look like the one you see on the left came along. As we noted in the listing:

  • Leave it to Better Records to figure out a complicated title with a long history such as this one – originals, reissues, monos, stereos, we had to play them all to find a copy that sounds as good as this one does.
  • Full, rich, and spacious with an abundance of Tubey Magic and, better yet, not the least bit dry, hard or transistory.

Some quick notes:

Bowtie Label Stereo

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Energy Is Key to Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues

More of the Music of Janis Joplin

ENERGY is the key element missing from the average copy of I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, but not on this bad boy (or girl if you prefer). 

Drop the needle on the song Try and just listen to how crisp, punchy, and BIG the drums sound.

On many copies — too many copies — the vocals are pinched and edgy. Here they’re breathy and full — a much better way for Janis to sound. There’s some grit to the vocals at times and the brass as well, but the life force on these sides is so strong that we much preferred it to the smoother, duller, deader copies we heard that didn’t have that issue.

On copy after copy we heard pinched squawky horns and harsh vocals, not a good sound for this album.

Janis’ voice needs lots of space up top to get good and loud, and the best sides give her all the space she needs.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities:

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Legrand Jazz – Skip the Mono

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

This review is from well over ten years ago.

This album is more common in mono than stereo, but we found the sound of the mono pressing we played seriously wanting. It’s dramatically smaller and more squawky and crude than even the worst of the stereo pressings we played. 

We had a copy we liked years ago, but that was years ago.

We don’t have that copy anymore and we don’t have a stereo that sounds the way our old one did either.

More on the subject of mono versus stereo.

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