usatran, There you have me (when it comes to Blue Note). True, the occasional pressing is terrific, but on average I find them to be a bit "muddy". What makes BN collectible in my opinion (of course) is the major important jazz artists whose performances are captured on that label. Some of the Japanese reissues are superior, purely with respect to sound quality, to the originals. Of course, this is a broad generalization and based on subjective opinion.
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Richard, I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but IC = InterConnect.
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Your Krell preamplifier likely has a very wide bandwidth, which makes it susceptible to RFI in the environment, though perhaps not a source of RFI. RFI can get in by radiation from an outside source like a radio antenna or on the AC line via wires or on an IC connector, also via traveling on the wire.
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I think you’ve received a mountain of advice re jazz LPs.
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Jazz is like caviar or lox. You need to develop a taste for it if it doesn’t immediately grab you. But also jazz as an idiom suffers in popularity owing to the myriad of mediocre musicians and styles that claim to be “jazz”.
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jerroldis, The OP has since modified his question to say he just wants to identify high quality jazz LPs, even though jazz is not his cup of music. We all agree that the question about "proving" that analog is superior to digital is a can of worms best left unopened. So by the same token there is no sense citing digital to prove the opposite.
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No, I think you have a point, and that's why I get aggravated by some who say they don't like jazz but who then cite music or musicians that I don't think of as jazz-y in any sense, as examples. I must admit my own idea of jazz is fairly parochial. I listen to live performances locally by musicians that adhere to the rules of bebop or "modern jazz", meaning post WW2 jazz and therefore including KOB, for example, which is not really bebop. I own probably ~3000 Jazz LPs encoding performances by musicians that are mostly deceased, therefore. Spiro Gyra is not jazz to me, although I would not deny the possible musical merit.
By the way, it took me a long time to see the irony in this thread: If you don't care for jazz, then why ask about a jazz LP that proves any point about digital vs analog?
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Grisly, I’m sure Paul can play in the jazz idiom, but he’s no “jazz musician”.
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Also great Chet Baker recordings on Sam’s Records, in mono, pressed in France. I’ve got at least two, maybe three albums. All make you forget that the signal is mono. Quality of the vinyl is the highest.
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I cannot imagine the "open air" approach to buliding a plinth for a 301 would be efficacious, for me at least, because what you want to suppress in a 301 is vibration and motor noise. For that it seems to me you need mass. That’s just my opinion.
So I quite agree with your choice to fill the space in the hollow plinth. But in your first post where you described what you are building, it seemed at first reading that you plan to interpose springs between the chassis of the 301 and the solid plinth you are making with MDF. It think that would not be good, to put it mildly. I'd mate the chassis to the plinth as firmly and as completely as possible. As for the choice of MDF, I never want it near the sound producing elements because my bias is it sounds muffled, or it adds a muffled coloration. But again, just my opinion.
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Coltrane, You wrote, "But as bebop became dominant the majority of listeners were forever lost. I don’t mind, because bebop was a natural step for new jazz. Personally, bebop was a statement by certain musicians who felt disrespected. So they created a music that many couldn’t play. Still, the advancement of the music suffered among the masses."
Yes, it's difficult to play bebop well, or any other style of jazz, for that matter, because of the need to improvise. But why was it then, if jazz suffered among the masses due to bebop, that Miles Davis, Gillespie, here I will add Gerry Mulligan and Thelonius Monk, and your namesake Coltrane, sold more albums among them than most any jazz instrumentalists before or since? I just don't agree that bebop alienated listeners; rather, it made jazz musicians and those who listened to their music "cool cats". It was in fashion, then it went out of fashion, like many other cultural phenomena, except for a few diehards like me and many thousands of others who pay high prices for the LPs in that genre. Bebop probably faded on the national scene, because it became repetitious, difficult though it might be. Bebop lived right through and beyond Elvis's peak. It might be more accurate to say the Beatles took over in popularity from everything else musical in the late 60s. On the other hand, I am never caught listening to Vaughn Williams.
There's a vocalise that describes the life and times of bebop, called "Boplicity".
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Richard, I’m not sure what you’re doing with that plinth, but 301 plinth building is a vast subject. One common solution is to build a plinth out of layers of Baltic birch cut precisely to embrace the working bits as snugly as possible. I am sure you can find videos on YouTube which demonstrate the process, and you can even find the patterns for the many layers with precise measurements also on line. The chassis is not suspended over the base because the object is to soak up energy and noise from the motor and idler wheel. Food for your thought. What you describe seems not the best approach.
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Coltrane, perhaps you didn’t mean to infer that bebop is anything other than “jazz”. But if you did, I must protest. Bebop IS and was jazz after WW2, pioneered by Charley Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and many others. By the mid-50s, bebop was dominant. One of the important reasons why KOB was so noteworthy at that time (1958) was that it represented an experimental departure. But jazz musicians still play bebop style and structure to this day, just not exclusively.
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Is the UHQR reissue corrected for the speed error inherent in the original tape? I’m not sure that would be a good thing. I am conditioned to the off speed version, since that day I took the bus into downtown New Haven, owing to the fact I was too young to drive, in order to buy the original in 1958. I own several of the many reissues since then, as well, one of which I think is speed corrected. I can't recall my impression of that one version, but I have a feeling it would sound too bright. There is something dark about the music which makes it irresistible and probably has something to do with its slightly erroneous pitch.
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If only the weight of the vinyl was proportionate to sound quality, buying LPs would be a simple matter. Too bad it is not.
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So perhaps that explains the special-ness of Among Friends, in that Trio were showing off their capabilities. I have a Denon branded jazz LP that is also superb sonically. Pepper died in bad shape in 1982, but in 1978 he still had all his chops, as evidenced by his work on this LP. Session photos show his aging, however, compared to his earlier Contemporary album photos.
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Not sure if I have “Today” LP. I’ll have to check. I also have high regard for Cecil McBee. Until the other night, I didn’t know I had “Among Friends” on Trio hidden in a low shelf in a cabinet I don’t often search. There may be more unplayed gems in that space. Do you suppose Trio is related to Kenwood? Trio is the name of the company in Japan.
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There’s no way to predict the excellence of a particular LP, in terms of sound quality. There is always an element of serendipity. But for jazz, ECM, Pablo, Bethlehem, Riverside, Contemporary, then Columbia, are pretty reliable. Perhaps best ever were Reference Recordings. I don’t like Sheffield because the artists they recorded were in general second rate, with apologies to Harry James. Case in point for serendipity, last night I picked out an LP from one of my less used storage bins: Art Pepper, “Among Friends” on the Trio label. I played it because I love Art Pepper and was curious because it was recorded in 1978 in stereo, near his death. I can only say buy it if you can find it, dead silent surface with in your face reality. I could easily imagine myself in the room. But who knew?
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In my above post, the sentence "In general I have found that sampling is a good thing." contains a typo. Should have written or meant to write "upsampling" is a good thing.
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Vinylshadow, that hasn’t been my experience. In general I have found that sampling is a good thing. Also, you leave out SACD. I find that music recorded as SACD and played back as such is far superior to RBCD; whereas older recordings reproduced on SACD are not noticeably superior to the original RBCD. I really cannot enjoy RBCD except as background when I don’t feel like playing LPs, for reading a book or at parties. I don’t care how good or expensive the RBCD player is reputed to be.
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Richardbrand, With all due respect, you asked a very bad, very open-ended question with many ambiguous edges (the question pre-supposes that analog is in fact superior to digital and that there is or could ever be such a thing as a recording that could possibly prove such a tenuous proposition to all listeners), and yet some have tried to respond. Amazing. No doubt this thread will live on for yet a few more weeks.
Kind of Blue is not and never was revered because it was a great recording per se. It is revered because it was revolutionary in terms of musical structure in 1958 and probably because of Miles Davis' mystique and that of the other members of his group (Coltrane and Evans in particular). Technically, it was famously off-speed and originally in mono.
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