stereo-is-mono

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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Chet Baker and Art Pepper / Playboys

More Chet Baker

More Art Pepper

  • An outstanding Boplicity reissue that boasts dynamic and lively West Coast Jazz sound from start to finish – it earned Double Plus (A++) grades and plays on exceptionally quiet vinyl to boot
  • Both of these sides have close to the best condition grade we give out, Mint Minus – there may not be another record on the site with vinyl that quiet!
  • The label may say stereo, but the sound on both of these sides is pure, glorious 1958 Tube-recorded MONO
  • Bigger and more present and energetic than most of the other copies we played, the horns sound fuller and have more space to play into – it’s the Tubey Magical classic 50s jazz sound, the only sound that ever works for this kind of music in our experience
  • This album was reissued with a different title in 1961 as Picture of Heath — we’ve played both the original and the Pure Pleasure Heavy Vinyl reissue from 2006
  • 4 stars: “These thoroughly enjoyable and often high-energy sides are perfect for bop connoisseurs as well as mainstream jazz listeners.”

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Why Has Nobody (Besides Us) Noticed that Side One Is Often Mono?

itsab

More of the Music of It’s a Beautiful Day

This Super Hot Stamper Red Label pressing gives you most of the 360 Label’s rich, Tubey Magical sound, and that’s saying a lot; most red label pressings of this record are absolute junk. About half of the side ones are in MONO — how about that! Who knew, right?

Just did a search and cannot find a single mention of this fact.

Seems that someone should have noticed it by now (besides us of course).

How critically can music lovers and audiophiles be listening to their records if they don’t notice such a glaringly obvious change in the sound?

Here’s what we had to say about a copy on our site a while back:

Going through our clean 360 label pressings (which aren’t cut quite as loud by the way so watch out when doing your own shootouts), we found one that was better and one that was worse. Others were just too noisy. This red label pressing was BY FAR THE BEST of the red label reissues, with A++ sound on both sides that frankly took us by surprise.

As we so often say, Who knew? Now that we’ve heard red labels that sound this good we are on the hunt! They can be found, and they’re usually not in trashed condition the way the 360s are.

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Chet Baker & Art Pepper / Playboys – Our Shootout Winner from 2015

More of the Music of Art Pepper

Side one is White Hot, side two nearly so, and both contain swingin’ West Coast Jazz from 1956. These 1983 reissues on Boplicity are dynamic and lively, perfectly suited to the energy of the music. The 1956 All Tube mono recording here has this Hot/Cool jazz sounding the way it should.

The 1983 version we are offering here says stereo on the label, but the sound is pure mono, a good reason not to trust labels!  (more…)