[Dixielandjazz] 45 RPM vinyl reprise.

[Harry Callaghan]

Steve:

What you have to say here is of course quite informative.

But let us not forget the other side of the coin.  I speak of collectors who
could care less about the fidelity.

They are not interested in having a recording re-issued on LP, audio
cassette or CD. but want the shellac 78. and mind you, the original issue
because they will know by it's catalog number whether it is.or not..

I have many early Sinatra recordings when he was with Dorsey that I have
since found are bringing some hefty bucks and could very well attempt to
sell them on EBay or elsewhere since I have the same numbers on LPs or CDs.

However, in my 58 years of music-collecting, I have never sought to obtain
anything because of its material value and don't wish to profit at this time
by whatever valuable recordings might be found in my collection.

I even have a 12" Caruso recorded on one-side, easily twice the thickness of
your later 10" 78s but I just keep it mounted on my music wall along with
some framed very early sheet music (black, white and orange only)

Yup, just a sentimental slob at heart.

Tides
HC


On 8/8/10, Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> 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.”
>
>
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