[Dixielandjazz] 45 RPM vinyl reprise.

[Stephen G Barbone]

For the sound techies. Do 45s sound better?

Cheers,
Steve barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

August 6, 2010 - NY TIMES - By Fred Kaplan
Back in the Groove: Jazz Reissues on Vinyl

THERE are two kinds of obsessive record collectors: those who buy  
original pressings of rare old LPs because they’re rare and old, and  
those who buy them because they sound good.

In the jazz world one record label has attained near-mystical status  
among the antiquarians and the audiophiles: Blue Note, especially the  
albums released in its heyday, from 1955 to ’67.

Mint-condition Blue Notes from that era sell in specialty stores and  
online auctions for hundreds of dollars, and in some cases, a few  
thousand.

Yes, they’re available on compact disc, but the CDs lack the LPs’  
visual cool — the urban photos and silk-screen lettering on the hand- 
pasted cardboard covers — and fall far short of the first-edition  
vinyl’s sonics: the vibrant horns, wood-thumping bass, head-snap drums  
and sizzling cymbals.

Lately a few audiophile companies have taken pains to recreate this  
golden-age experience. Working with the original master tapes and  
custom-built record-cutting gear, they’re reissuing classic Blue Notes  
on 12-inch LPs that are not only made of pristine vinyl but also  
mastered to play at 45 revolutions per minute. Since 45 r.p.m. is  
about one-third faster than the 33 1/3 r.p.m. of standard LPs, each  
disc holds one-third less music, meaning that the tracks on a single  
album have to be spread out over two slabs of vinyl.

These double-disc 45-r.p.m. Blue Notes are boutique items, made by  
just two companies — Music Matters Jazz in Los Angeles and Analogue  
Productions in Salina, Kan. (A third company, Classic Records in Los  
Angeles, which pioneered the practice, suspended business several  
months ago and was recently bought out by Analogue Productions.)

Both companies press these albums in limited editions of 2,500 per  
title. Music Matters has released 64 titles so far, with 116 more in  
the works. Analogue has put out 32. Each title sells for $50 (through  
direct order from their Web sites, musicmatters.com and  
acousticsounds.com).

Fifty bucks may seem outlandish for a record album. But if your  
turntable cost a few thousand dollars, and your stereo system cost  
much more, it’s not out of line, especially since these reissues sound  
better than originals costing 10 to 100 times as much (when you can  
find them).

“The Blue Note sound”, as devotees call it, was the creation of Rudy  
Van Gelder, an optometrist who, starting in the early 1950s, took off  
a day or two each week to record jazz musicians in his parents’ living  
room in Hackensack, N.J. Demand for his talents grew so steadily that  
in 1959, at the age of 35, he quit his practice, built a studio in  
nearby Englewood Cliffs and became a recording engineer full time.

Michael Cuscuna, a record producer who has deeply plumbed the Blue  
Note archive, said: “Rudy went to see a lot of live jazz as a young  
man. His goal, as an engineer, was to capture that live experience on  
tape.”

There were a handful of great jazz engineers at the time: Fred Plaut  
at Columbia, Roy Goodman at RCA, Val Valentin at Verve, Roy DuNann at  
Contemporary. (Some audiophile companies —Speakers Corner, ORG, Music  
On Vinyl and Pure Pleasure — have also reissued LPs of their albums.)

“What made Rudy distinctive,” Mr. Cuscuna said, “was that he had no  
fear. Other engineers were cautious at setting levels. Rudy pushed it  
to the edge. He got more signal, more music, more power — this  
saturation of sound. When you listen to Jackie McLean playing  
saxophone on a Blue Note album, you hear all this wind pushing through  
the horn. There’s this up-close, you-are-there sound.”

In 1994 Mike Hobson, who owned a high-end audio store in Lower  
Manhattan, approached Mr. Cuscuna with the idea of reissuing a series  
of Blue Notes on high-quality vinyl. Mr. Hobson, then 35, had just  
started Classic Records and was making vinyl reissues of RCA Living  
Stereo classical LPs, the originals of which were audiophile  
collectors’ items.

Mr. Cuscuna helped Mr. Hobson select titles and arrange licensing  
rights. Classic’s first Blue Note reissues — famous titles like John  
Coltrane’s “Blue Train” and Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else” —  
came out in 1996 and sold well enough to spur more.

Initially he cut these LPs at 33 1/3 r.p.m. That was daring enough:  
CDs had reigned supreme for nearly a decade; most audiophiles figured  
vinyl was dead. Still, Mr. Hobson ultimately wanted to make 45s, and  
he cut some test pressings just to hear them. They sounded much better.

The grooves on an LP are the music’s actual acoustic waves, etched on  
a master disc’s cutting lathe. A turntable’s cartridge traces those  
grooves; the signal, when amplified, reproduces the sound.

On standard-speed LPs, however, some grooves, especially those  
representing very quiet sounds, are so tiny and so tightly curved that  
no cartridge can track them perfectly. As a result fine details — the  
full shimmer of a cymbal, the vibrating wood of a bass, the sense of  
real people playing in a real space — get a little bit smeared.

But the grooves on a 45-r.p.m. LP are spread out more widely. Their  
undulations are much less sharp, so they’re easier to navigate. “The  
cartridge ferrets out a lot more low-level detail within the groove’s  
walls,” Mr. Hobson said. “It connects you a little more closely to the  
live music. We’re trying to do time traveling here.”

In the mid-1970s a handful of small labels released albums of new  
music at 45 r.p.m. They never sold enough to generate even a minor  
trend, but they sounded amazingly vivid.

In 1998 Mr. Hobson took a leap and released his first 45-r.p.m.  
reissues, starting with RCA Living Stereos. In 2000 he moved on to  
some Blue Notes. (The first ones were, again, the Coltrane and  
Adderley LPs.) He pressed only a few hundred copies of each. “And they  
didn’t exactly fly out the window,” he recalled.

One problem might have been that he went too far. He’d heard tests in  
which single-sided LPs — with grooves on one side, a flat blank  
surface on the other — sounded better than two-sided LPs. (This may  
seem crazy, but it’s true; I’ve heard the same tests.) So he put out  
his 45s like that, meaning each album had to be spread out across not  
just two slabs of vinyl but four. “I figured if we’re going all out,  
let’s go all out,” he recalled. But these records were very expensive  
to make, and even audiophiles found them unwieldy.

Still, those who heard them were impressed with the sound. One was  
Chad Kassem, president of Analogue Productions. A canny entrepreneur  
who speaks in a slow New Orleans drawl, Mr. Kassem started collecting  
records in 1986, when he was 24. He turned it into a business four  
years later, first buying and selling private collections, then  
manufacturing LP reissues, including albums from Fantasy’s Original  
Jazz Classics catalog, like Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debbie” and Sonny  
Rollins’s “Way Out West.”

After hearing Classic’s 45s Mr. Kassem put out the first of 100  
Fantasy albums in 45 r.p.m. (though on just two LPs per title, not  
four), in editions of 1,000, for $50 each. About half the titles sold  
out.

Around this time Ron Rambach and Joe Harley started thinking about  
joining the game. Mr. Rambach had run the archive for Leon Leavitt,  
the world’s largest purveyor of rare jazz records. Mr. Harley was (and  
still is) vice president of a high-end audio manufacturer, AudioQuest,  
and had produced some jazz records on the side.

Both were passionate about Blue Note and decided they’d reissue only  
Blue Note albums. Initially they were going to put them out at 33 1/3  
r.p.m., but after they heard Mr. Kassem’s Fantasy 45s, they knew they  
had to match that sonic standard.

They took the competition up a notch by meticulously recreating the  
Blue Note album covers, matching the Pantone colors and the 3-mil  
laminate lettering, even using the original photos rather than simply  
taking a digital scan. And rather than putting each of the two discs  
inside one record sleeve, they made gatefold covers and filled the  
inside spaces with fine reproductions of the famous photos that  
Francis Wolff took at the recording sessions.

Finally they decided to reissue some of the more adventurous Blue  
Notes. Classic and Analogue had focused on more commercial hard-bop  
artists (for example, Hank Mobley and Art Blakey). Music Matters did  
some of that too, but also reissued the likes of Eric Dolphy’s “Out to  
Lunch” and Andrew Hill’s “Point of Departure.”

In the meantime Mr. Kassem has moved on to reissuing 45-r.p.m. LPs  
from the Verve and Impulse jazz catalogs. Kevin Gray, of RTI and  
AcousTech, who masters LPs for Analogue and Music Matters, and for  
several larger pop-music labels, is cutting more vinyl now than at any  
other time in his company’s 15-year history, he said. Last year 2.5  
million LPs were sold nationwide, up from 1.9 million in 2008 and  
990,000 in ’07. These figures amount to less than 2 percent of the  
music market, but they’re at their highest level in two decades.

The 45-r.p.m. LP is a fringe phenomenon, but it’s the fine-laced  
fringe of a market that’s in revival. Mr. Rambach said, “There’s  
plenty of room for everyone.”