The Vinyl Press

Clifford Jordan- Glass Bead Games Shoot-Out  By Ken Golden I’ve been asked by Fearless Leader to do a “shoot out” comparison between an original Strata-East pressing of Clifford Jordan Quartet “Glass Bead Games” (SES 19737/8) and the recent reissue from Pure Pleasure Records out of the UK. Some brief background – Strata-East Records was co-founded by Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell.  The name was taken in tribute to the Detroit based Strata Records label.  The exclusive focus of the label was black jazz musicians.  The range of music touched on post-bop, hard bop, modal, and free jazz – typically embedded with a strong ethnic/urban flavor.  Exploration of the artists’ African heritage is a common theme.  The label has become known as the Godhead of the so-called “spiritual jazz” movement.  It wasn’t called that back in the 70s but a look in the rear-view mirror by jazz collectors and musical historians typically points to Strata-East.  Of course, there were many other labels that fit the sub-genre but that’s a story for another day. Many Strata-East albums were recorded at Minot Sound Studio in White Plains, NY.  Strata-East recordings ranged from borderline unlistenable (Music Inc. “Live At Slugs’”) to exceptional (The Heath Brothers “Marchin’ On”).  Mostly they fell right in the middle of the pack, meaning professional well recorded albums that would not deter from the listening experience.  The recordings done at Minot fit right here. As a reissue label, Pure Pleasure does good solid work. However, something seems to have changed over the years. It is not clear what source material they are relying on for these releases.  In fact the label seems to go out of the way to cloud the issue.  They nonetheless caught lightning in a bottle with their reissues of the Strata East catalogue.  With prices of original pressings spiraling out of sight, it’s no wonder.  Pure Pleasure reissues are pressed at Pallas and use Ray Staff for mastering.  You are going to get the … [Read More...]

An Experiment with Platter Mats- the MyMat Introduction Until I performed some recent experiments with a product called the MyMat, offered by a long-time member of the Audiogon community, I rarely thought about changing out platter mats. I’ve owned a number of good turntables over the years and figured: (a) that the manufacturer knew what was best, and (b) going down this rabbit hole was yet another potential morass—that the results would vary considerably based on a number of factors, including the particular turntable design and platter. How “projectable” would anyone’s findings be for others with different systems and preferences? As someone said in another context (having to do with the art of recording), there’s a lot of fiddling and manipulation to get something to sound “natural.”   The interface between the record and the stylus is affected by a number of elements including the mat, the platter, the arm and arguably the turntable itself. And we haven’t even gotten to the rest of the system—how it shades the sound in various ways, from light to dark, from analytical to soft and burnished; these variations may call for a different character in the front end of a vinyl system than another system which has a different overall sound. Ideally, I know all this stuff should be uncolored. But ask anybody who has thrown money, time and effort at building a system and they’ll tell you they didn’t hear the coloration until it was absent. Each element of the system is dependent on the other, which makes evaluating a single device in isolation difficult on any “absolute” basis, applicable to all systems and configurations. That said, if you read the Internet for information on audio, you’ll see that platter mat swapping is a common enough practice across the range of audiophiles, from the budget conscious to the cost no object crowd, with different objectives, from minimizing static to tuning the sound.   Starting with a Restored SP-10 I started exploring the topic in … [Read More...]