More of the Music of Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins Albums We’ve Reviewed
More Records that Sound Too Much Like CDs
Pictured is OJC 029, one of the earliest Sonny Rollins titles they picked to remaster.
Too bad they didn’t do a very good job with it.
The copy we auditioned did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.
The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is unlikely to ever be of audiophile quality.
There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed? — but we’re pretty sure the OJC will always fall short of the mark.
We created two sections for the OJC label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the (probably, see the paragraph above) bad sounding ones.
If you know of a great sounding pressing of the album, feel free to let us in on what pressing you have and we might just pick one up and give it a listen.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 33 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best. (more…)
More of the Music of Eric Dolphy
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Eric Dolphy
Do the originals sound as good as these ’70s pressings?
Not a clue. Never ran into a clean one in my life.
Rarely have I heard a string bass sound better than it does here. The flute is equally gorgeous. Amazing that they could record a live jazz concert this well in 1961.
Although this is only our second Hot Stamper listing for the album, I’ve known about Dolphy’s legendary Copenhagen Concert for close to thirty years. When an audiophile hears a bass clarinet reproduced the way it is on this record he is very unlikely to forget it.
With the hundred-plus changes to the system and room I’ve made over that span of time the reproduction of the bass clarinet has only gotten more real.
It’s proof positive that everything in audio can get dramatically better with constant effort and attention to every aspect of sound. From the room to the electricity to the right cleaning techniques, everything can come together to make that instrument sound like it is in the room with you, a room that sounds like you imagine a jazz club might sound in 1961.
What a thrill. It’s what we audiophiles live for. It’s what keeps us going in this hobby.
If you know people who used to be into audio and aren’t anymore it’s because they just never got to the point where they were doing it right.
More Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder
Some OJC Pressings Sound Good, Some Don’t
This One Doesn’t
Typical bad OJC sound – thin and modern, lacking in the Tubey Magic that makes vintage pressings so musically involving.
This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from the ’80s, but we found the sound of the OJC pressings we played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that that plays right into the prejudices of most record collectors and audiophiles 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.
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.
Credits
Alto Saxophone – Jackie McLean
Bass – Addison Farmer
Congas – Candido
Cover – Tom Hannan
Drums – Art Taylor
Liner Notes – Ira Gitler
Piano – Duke Jordan
Recorded By – Van Gelder*
Supervised By – Bob Weinstock
Tenor Saxophone – Gene Ammons
Trumpet – Art Farmer
Notes
Recorded in Hackensack, NJ; April 23, 1956.
More of the Music of John Coltrane
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane
Hey Tom,
The Coltrane I got from you recently is mind-blowing. The texture and tone are something I’ve never heard from him before.
I played the first track (Lush Life) on my super high end digital setup first to set a baseline, while reading through the LP liner notes, and it sounded great. We’re talking a $17.5k streamer and a $27k DAC.
Then I played the same track on your record while attempting to finish the liner notes (with balanced levels etc.). I couldn’t focus on the text for even a minute. It was completely different and totally captivating. I went through the whole of side one (AAA) in a trance of ‘rightness’ bordering on a religious experience, in true communion with ‘Trane.
That’s why I buy Better Records!
C
Conrad,
Your letter makes me sad. You spent all that money on expensive digital playback and you got NOTHING for it but junk CD sound.
How many audiophiles have had the experience you just had? Not many. And certainly not from the typical cheap reissue.
But the cheap reissue kills the originals we’ve played, more evidence that you had a very special experience not shared by even those audiophiles with good turntables. Cheap reissues can’t sound any good! They’re cheap. They’re reissues.
And of course the CD and digital guys are really shit out of luck. They have no way of even knowing what they are missing, right?
Here’s the $64,000 question:
Did you?
No, you didn’t. Not until you played the right record. Then the skies opened up and the scales fell from your eyes.
Those are precisely the records we run into when when we do shootouts and listen for the knockouts. We find records with that sound.
Nobody else can find records like the ones we sell except by luck, and luck is not a good approach to record collecting. (But it can help.)
Enjoy!
TP
Hot Stamper Pressings that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue
Records We’ve Reviewed that Sound Their Best on the Right Reissue
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More of the Music of John Coltrane
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of John Coltrane
Should You Collect the Original Pressing on this Title?
No. Which means we was wrong about Lush Life.
A classic case ofLive and Learn. Previously we had written:
“There are great sounding originals, but they are few and far between…”
We no longer believe that to be true. In fact we believe the opposite of that statement to be true. The original we had on hand — noisy but with reasonably good sound, or so we thought — was an absolute joke next to our best Hot Stamper pressings. Half the size, half the clarity and presence, half the life and energy, half the immediacy, half the studio space. It was simply not remotely competitive with the copies we now know (or at least believe, all knowledge being provisional) to have the best sound.
Are there better originals than the ones we’ve played? No doubt. If you want to spend your day searching for them, more power to you. And if you do find one that impresses you, we are happy to send you one of our Hot Copies to play against it. We are confident that the outcome would be clearly favorable to our pressing. Ten seconds of side one should be enough to convince you that our record is in an entirely different league, a league we had no idea even existed until just this year.
By the way, the mono original we played wasby farthe worst sound I have ever heard for the album.
By far.
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More of the Music of John Coltrane
Hot Stamper Titles that Sound Their Best in Mono
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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Hot Stamper Pressings of Sonny Rollins’s Albums Available Now
Sonny Rollins Albums We’ve Reviewed
OJC 007, the first Sonny Rollins title they picked to remaster. Too bad they did such a poor good job with it.
The copy we auditioned did not impress us sonically, so don’t expect to see Hot Stampers of this title on OJC coming to the Better Records website any time soon.
The music might be wonderful — we unreservedly follow the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum — but the sound of this pressing is unlikely to ever be of audiophile quality.
There may be great sounding pressings of the album – how could we possibly know there aren’t without playing every version ever pressed? — but we’re pretty sure the OJC will always fall short of the mark.
We created two sections for the OJC label: one for the (potentially, it’s what Hot Stampers are all about) good sounding OJC pressings and one for the (probably, see the paragraph above) bad sounding ones.
If you know of a great sounding pressing of the album, feel free to let us in on what pressing you have and we might just pick one up and give it a listen.
We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 33 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.
Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best. (more…)
Hot Stampers of Sonny Rollins’ Albums in Stock
Reviews and Commentaries for Saxophone Colossus
One of our good customers has started a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Below is a link to a comparison he carried out with a few pressings of Sonny Rollins’ classic Saxophone Colossus, including the DCC, the OJC, and one of our Hot Stampers.
We will have some comments to add to his down the road. For now, please to enjoy.
Robert has approached the various problems he’s encountered methodically and carefully along these three fronts:
- Improving hisequipment,
- Teaching himself how to do a better job ofdialing in his turntable setup, and
- Learning how to docontrolled shootoutsfor his favorite albums.
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More of the Music of Gene Ammons
More Recordings by Rudy Van Gelder
For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good a 1958 All Tube Analog Prestige recording by Rudy Van Gelder can sound, this killer copy will do the trick.
This pressing is super spacious, sweet and positively dripping with ambience. Talk about Tubey Magic, the liquidity of the sound here is positively uncanny. This is vintage analog at its best, so full-bodied and relaxed you’ll wonder how it ever came to be that anyone seriously contemplated trying to improve it.
This IS the sound of Tubey Magic. No recordings will ever be made like this again, and no CD will ever capture what is in the grooves of this record. There is, of course, a CD of this album, but those of us who possess a working turntable and a good collection of vintage vinyl could care less.
What We Listen For on Blue Gene
The best copies are rich and tubey; many pressings were thin and modern sounding, and for that they would lose a lot of points. We want this record to sound like something RVG recorded in 1958, and the best copies give you that sound, without the surface noise and groove damage the originals doubtless suffer from.
Some copies have much more space; some are more present, putting the musicians right in the room with you; some are more transparent, resolving the musical information much better than others, letting you “see” everyone in the studio clearly. Some have more rhythmic drive than others. On some the musicians seem more involved and energetic than they do on the average pressing.
The copies that do all these things better than other copies are the ones that win our shootouts.
This is clearly one of the better copies we have ever played. We think you will enjoy it immensely. And watch for more Gene Ammons records coming to the site soon. With RVG at the board his recordings are often superb.
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The Music of Sonny Rollins Available Now
Sonny Rollins Albums We’ve Reviewed
We used to like this record a whole lot more than we do now. Based on what we heard last time we played it, we cannot recommend it.
A classic case of live and learn.
Our previous commentary:
This Prestige Two-Fer Double LP boasts EXCELLENT SOUND, right up there with some the best sounding copies we’ve played. Three sides out of four sounded surprisingly good, which is three good sides more than the average copy can claim. Oddly enough, the stampers are identical. Sample to sample variation? Fresh off the stamper transparency? Who’s to say? I can’t explain it, but I know a better record when I play one. This copy is clearly more transparent, no pun intended. It’s also been through our extensive cleaning process, which as you can imagine helps the sound immeasurably.
For more reviews of Two-Fer pressings, click here.
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