Vinyl Me Please Classics

[MikeH]

I was referring to adding these titles to the BN80 campaign (or whatever, the basic, no frills presses). No conflict 5 years ago, no conflict now. And honestly, I'm not sure I get your point about pricing, most people aren't prepared to pay 75-100 bucks that MM are asking for a record now.

My point is that the major selling point of MM now was that the quality is top notch and there are certain titles you can only get in that quality of pressing unless you go for an original or very early pressing. But the gap in quality between MM and cheaper pressings is shrinking rapidly. This was not the case when the BN75 series came out. You had MM, AP and BN75 as your options pretty much for new pressings/remasters on vinyl. And AP and MM were a similar price point. If Blue Note released Speak No Evil in the BN80 or Tone Poet quality, nearly nobody would be buying the SRX. You'd have the people who want to complete their collections of MM, sure, but most others would skip it. The SRXs selling out so quickly and then popping up on ebay and selling for $200+ also shows there is the market for the $75 price point on certain titles. I know they didn't press a ton of them, but still. I don't typically shell out $75 for a 1LP album but Speak No Evil is hard to find as an older pressing or anything high quality for $75 or under. It's the only MM album I have bought directly through them as well. Had it been on BN80 or TP, I would have skipped the SRX.

The MM pressings started out at $35 and went up to $50 list price. People were absolutely willing to pay that. It's why nearly every 33RPM MM pressing is out of stock, and they all sell for way more than that now on the resale market. MM has started the shitty practice of trying to get a slice of resale on their own by not letting other retailers sell them and hiking their prices up as inventory goes down, which is why some of the 45s aren't selling out. Why would you pay $125 for the MM version of Takin' Off when you can get the BN80 for over $100 cheaper? Is a nicer jacket and slight jump in sound quality worth $100 to a lot of people?

Blue Note selling high quality pressings of classic albums at lower prices screws over MM while they have the licenses to press. If you're flooding the market with titles at various price points where the quality isn't all that different, what's the reasoning for buying the most expensive pressing? Blue Note's biggest currency is their titles and being able to dictate who presses what. They can license more popular titles to places like MM, make a decent chunk of change and really have to do nothing else. It's pure profit.

There's a reasoning behind the different tiers of pricing and quality that BN does. The idea behind the BN75 series was get new people into jazz by pressing really cheap copies of classic titles. It's very easy to get someone to double dip on buying BN albums when you have a cheapo copy, love the record and then want to bump up to a MM or AP pressing of it. You're not going to get many people double dipping on a BN80 or Tone Poet and then something of AP/MM quality. The TP series is designed to A) expose people to the other catalogues like Pacific Jazz and Solid State) and B) press lesser known titles at a higher quality. They are reaching pretty deep into the back catalogue for a lot of these TPs. The quality gets the "audiophiles" to purchase them and the price gets people who are newer into jazz to buy them as well. You're still getting both markets.

 

[Selaws]

My point is that the major selling point of MM now was that the quality is top notch and there are certain titles you can only get in that quality of pressing unless you go for an original or very early pressing. But the gap in quality between MM and cheaper pressings is shrinking rapidly. This was not the case when the BN75 series came out. You had MM, AP and BN75 as your options pretty much for new pressings/remasters on vinyl. And AP and MM were a similar price point. If Blue Note released Speak No Evil in the BN80 or Tone Poet quality, nearly nobody would be buying the SRX. You'd have the people who want to complete their collections of MM, sure, but most others would skip it. The SRXs selling out so quickly and then popping up on ebay and selling for $200+ also shows there is the market for the $75 price point on certain titles. I know they didn't press a ton of them, but still. I don't typically shell out $75 for a 1LP album but Speak No Evil is hard to find as an older pressing or anything high quality for $75 or under. It's the only MM album I have bought directly through them as well. Had it been on BN80 or TP, I would have skipped the SRX.

The MM pressings started out at $35 and went up to $50 list price. People were absolutely willing to pay that. It's why nearly every 33RPM MM pressing is out of stock, and they all sell for way more than that now on the resale market. MM has started the shitty practice of trying to get a slice of resale on their own by not letting other retailers sell them and hiking their prices up as inventory goes down, which is why some of the 45s aren't selling out. Why would you pay $125 for the MM version of Takin' Off when you can get the BN80 for over $100 cheaper? Is a nicer jacket and slight jump in sound quality worth $100 to a lot of people?

Blue Note selling high quality pressings of classic albums at lower prices screws over MM while they have the licenses to press. If you're flooding the market with titles at various price points where the quality isn't all that different, what's the reasoning for buying the most expensive pressing? Blue Note's biggest currency is their titles and being able to dictate who presses what. They can license more popular titles to places like MM, make a decent chunk of change and really have to do nothing else. It's pure profit.

There's a reasoning behind the different tiers of pricing and quality that BN does. The idea behind the BN75 series was get new people into jazz by pressing really cheap copies of classic titles. It's very easy to get someone to double dip on buying BN albums when you have a cheapo copy, love the record and then want to bump up to a MM or AP pressing of it. You're not going to get many people double dipping on a BN80 or Tone Poet and then something of AP/MM quality. The TP series is designed to A) expose people to the other catalogues like Pacific Jazz and Solid State) and B) press lesser known titles at a higher quality. They are reaching pretty deep into the back catalogue for a lot of these TPs. The quality gets the "audiophiles" to purchase them and the price gets people who are newer into jazz to buy them as well. You're still getting both markets.

I have a question about the BN75 / BN80 pressings. I agree with you that the BN80 are miles ahead of the BN75's, but were they actually cheaper to produce or was it just poor Quality Checks that allowed for the inconsistencies.

 

[Mr Moore]

My point is that the major selling point of MM now was that the quality is top notch and there are certain titles you can only get in that quality of pressing unless you go for an original or very early pressing. But the gap in quality between MM and cheaper pressings is shrinking rapidly. This was not the case when the BN75 series came out. You had MM, AP and BN75 as your options pretty much for new pressings/remasters on vinyl. And AP and MM were a similar price point. If Blue Note released Speak No Evil in the BN80 or Tone Poet quality, nearly nobody would be buying the SRX. You'd have the people who want to complete their collections of MM, sure, but most others would skip it. The SRXs selling out so quickly and then popping up on ebay and selling for $200+ also shows there is the market for the $75 price point on certain titles. I know they didn't press a ton of them, but still. I don't typically shell out $75 for a 1LP album but Speak No Evil is hard to find as an older pressing or anything high quality for $75 or under. It's the only MM album I have bought directly through them as well. Had it been on BN80 or TP, I would have skipped the SRX.

The MM pressings started out at $35 and went up to $50 list price. People were absolutely willing to pay that. It's why nearly every 33RPM MM pressing is out of stock, and they all sell for way more than that now on the resale market. MM has started the shitty practice of trying to get a slice of resale on their own by not letting other retailers sell them and hiking their prices up as inventory goes down, which is why some of the 45s aren't selling out. Why would you pay $125 for the MM version of Takin' Off when you can get the BN80 for over $100 cheaper? Is a nicer jacket and slight jump in sound quality worth $100 to a lot of people?

Blue Note selling high quality pressings of classic albums at lower prices screws over MM while they have the licenses to press. If you're flooding the market with titles at various price points where the quality isn't all that different, what's the reasoning for buying the most expensive pressing? Blue Note's biggest currency is their titles and being able to dictate who presses what. They can license more popular titles to places like MM, make a decent chunk of change and really have to do nothing else. It's pure profit.

There's a reasoning behind the different tiers of pricing and quality that BN does. The idea behind the BN75 series was get new people into jazz by pressing really cheap copies of classic titles. It's very easy to get someone to double dip on buying BN albums when you have a cheapo copy, love the record and then want to bump up to a MM or AP pressing of it. You're not going to get many people double dipping on a BN80 or Tone Poet and then something of AP/MM quality.

Oh for sure, I don't doubt there is a market for those high prices, I just don't think it's a large market. I'd guess a similar amount of people who were prepared to pay the $40 asking price 5 years ago though.

I don't know much about the MM stuff, are they limited? I see stuff about them selling out, do they not keep pressing them or is the limited nature part of the selling point too and if so, how can people double-dip on records which are sold out?

 

[MikeH]

I have a question about the BN75 / BN80 pressings. I agree with you that the BN80 are miles ahead of the BN75's, but were they actually cheaper to produce or was it just poor Quality Checks that allowed for the inconsistencies.

BN75 was almost all digitally sourced (although there is some back and forth about whether this is true or not) and pressed at United. I don't remember who did the remasters. But Kevin Gray did AAA remasters of the BN80 series (where available, but it's for a large chunk of them) and they are pressed at Optimal in Germany so it's quite a big jump up in quality.

 

[tvham]

I was referring to adding these titles to the BN80 campaign (or whatever, the basic, no frills presses). No conflict 5 years ago, no conflict now. And honestly, I'm not sure I get your point about pricing, most people aren't prepared to pay 75-100 bucks that MM are asking for a record now.

I have become more of a jazz fan over the past couple of years and the BN80 and TP's have been a great way for me to find out about artists I didn't know or overlooked albums in more popular artist's catalogs. That being said, it is frustrating to me that some of the best known jazz albums of all time are only available as BN75 pressings that sound like crap for the most part. If I could drop $30 for BN80 quality pressings of Speak No Evil, The Sidewinder, Go!, Somethin' Else, etc etc I'd do so in an instant. (and yes, I know the 70's Japanese pressings are great but incredibly frustrating trying to track down copies shipped to the US from Japan for a decent price)

 

[CCKrone]

BN75 was almost all digitally sourced (although there is some back and forth about whether this is true or not) and pressed at United. I don't remember who did the remasters. But Kevin Gray did AAA remasters of the BN80 series (where available, but it's for a large chunk of them) and they are pressed at Optimal in Germany so it's quite a big jump up in quality.

Bernie Grundman did most of the BN75 and the pressings were almost always garbage (thanks United...).
I had a few, sold them as fast as I could because they usually sounded terrible

 

[Mr Moore]

I have become more of a jazz fan over the past couple of years and the BN80 and TP's have been a great way for me to find out about artists I didn't know or overlooked albums in more popular artist's catalogs. That being said, it is frustrating to me that some of the best known jazz albums of all time are only available as BN75 pressings that sound like crap for the most part. If I could drop $30 for BN80 quality pressings of Speak No Evil, The Sidewinder, Go!, Somethin' Else, etc etc I'd do so in an instant. (and yes, I know the 70's Japanese pressings are great but incredibly frustrating trying to track down copies shipped to the US from Japan for a decent price)

Yeah, BN75 did come from digital files and I guess we all have opinions on how much that matters if mastered well or not. These were mastered by Bernie Grundman and Alan Yoshida so they weren't exactly novices and the European presses were also done at Optimal, just like the BN80s. The EU versions don't deserve nearly the scorn the campaign blanket receives in my opinion. The only terrible BN75 I had was indeed a US press, Sam Rivers' Fuchsia Swing Song and boy is it a stinker, terrible distortion on several passages. I don't know how easy they are to come by from an EU website over there but I honestly think most people would feel like, "yeah, this is what I expect a $20 record to sound like" but of course, YMMV.

 

[MikeH]

Oh for sure, I don't doubt there is a market for those high prices, I just don't think it's a large market. I'd guess a similar amount of people who were prepared to pay the $40 asking price 5 years ago though.

I don't know much about the MM stuff, are they limited? I see stuff about them selling out, do they not keep pressing them or is the limited nature part of the selling point too and if so, how can people double-dip on records which are sold out?

Yes--MM is limited. I forget how many copies though. They do not really repress because they only have a license from BN to press a certain amount, as confirmed by MM themselves. The recent price hikes from MM has only been recent--everything from the newest batch launched at around $45-$50 and then they stopped letting other retailers sell them because they saw how high the resale rate was and started increasing prices the lower their inventory got on certain titles.

They were actually in stock for quite a long time until the last year or two when people realized how good the quality was and people were more willing to spend more on records. And flippers realized that the MM pressings turned a pretty profit once they sold out because there wasn't much in terms of competition for those titles at that quality. The BN75 series got a lot of people into jazz who previously weren't big jazz fans and those people (and flippers) bought up all the MM titles.

It's pretty abundantly clear that people now are willing to spend way more on records than they were 5 years ago. I know I personally would never have contemplated spending $75 on one record 5 years ago. That's a combination of me having more disposable income, buying more records, and also prices going up. Every label has hiked up prices and things are still selling out (and often quicker than they used to), so I know I'm not the only one.

The double dipping comes into play for the next batch of MM titles, if MM renegotiates a new license. It obviously doesn't matter about what albums are sold out now, but MM was given a lot of the better titles with an exclusive license from Blue Note. Blue Note deciding to press the same titles at Tone Poet or even BN80 quality essentially would mean the end of MM, which, to be honest, might happen anyway. Now that BN knows they can sell a shit ton of copies of albums at $25-35/pop and make a good profit, they might not need MM anymore. But I'm sure it was a pretty nice revenue stream for Blue Note while having to do just about nothing.

 

[NathanRicaud]

Bernie Grundman did most of the BN75 and the pressings were almost always garbage

Literally! And Bernie Grundman is great! BN75 is so rubbish I can’t! 🗑

They should do a damn recall on every BN75 pressings, just like they should with all 4 Men With Beards pressings!

 

[MikeH]

Yeah, BN75 did come from digital files and I guess we all have opinions on how much that matters if mastered well or not. These were mastered by Bernie Grundman and Alan Yoshida so they weren't exactly novices and the European presses were also done at Optimal, just like the BN80s. The EU versions don't deserve nearly the scorn the campaign blanket receives in my opinion. The only terrible BN75 I had was indeed a US press, Sam Rivers' Fuchsia Swing Song and boy is it a stinker, terrible distortion on several passages. I don't know how easy they are to come by from an EU website over there but I honestly think most people would feel like, "yeah, this is what I expect a $20 record to sound like" but of course, YMMV.

The US ones are absolutely awful and it took a lot to get a good copy of any of them. I gave up on it after having to return 5 copies of Blue Train. Warping, scratches, distortion...I had it all on any pressing I bought regardless of title. The digital files thing doesn't bother me much if it's remastered well. But the QC on the 75 series, at least over here, was abominable. And it makes sense--they were selling for $12-$15 here and I don't think you can really get high quality records produced at that cost. But that was kind of the point...and Don Was acknowledged that the pressing plant was a big issue for that series, as was people wanting AAA records.

Also, price-wise, shipping on EU copies of BN75 are almost as much as the records themselves most of the time and for me, personally, I have heard mixed things about the series there too so it's never been worth the gamble to me.

 

[MikeH]

I have become more of a jazz fan over the past couple of years and the BN80 and TP's have been a great way for me to find out about artists I didn't know or overlooked albums in more popular artist's catalogs. That being said, it is frustrating to me that some of the best known jazz albums of all time are only available as BN75 pressings that sound like crap for the most part. If I could drop $30 for BN80 quality pressings of Speak No Evil, The Sidewinder, Go!, Somethin' Else, etc etc I'd do so in an instant. (and yes, I know the 70's Japanese pressings are great but incredibly frustrating trying to track down copies shipped to the US from Japan for a decent price)

AP and Classic Records also had some decently priced reissues in the past 10 years or so that sound really nice but now that jazz vinyl has had a bit of a renaissance, it's really difficult to track any of those down for a decent price.

 

[tvham]

AP and Classic Records also had some decently priced reissues in the past 10 years or so that sound really nice but now that jazz vinyl has had a bit of a renaissance, it's really difficult to track any of those down for a decent price.

yeah, I'm probably part of that renaissance and part of the reason I can't find them! Agreed with what you said about the BN75 US pressings - my copy of Dexter Gordon's Go! was probably the worst sounding record in my collection before I got rid of it.

 

[Ponman2003]

YMMV.

Is that ‘your meters may vary’ over there?

 

[Mr Moore]

Is that ‘your meters may vary’ over there?

I'm a Brit, we use miles.

 

[TCell]

Latest Clue(s) from Storf:

1978
1995

 

[Selaws]

Have to admit that the BN75 passed by me (other than a Donald Byrd - At The Half Note which I picked up on the PIF thread) as I usually ignore modern reissues in favour of second-hand early pressings. I have all the Tone Poets to date apart from the last 2-3 and my girlfriend got me a few of the early BN80's which are fantastic.

I might be totally wrong here but I think a lot of people overthink or over scrutinise a lot of the newer releases. Maybe expectations are just higher now, but before these reissues I wonder how people felt about buying earlier second-hand pressings.

 

[trickyseven]

I have become more of a jazz fan over the past couple of years and the BN80 and TP's have been a great way for me to find out about artists I didn't know or overlooked albums in more popular artist's catalogs. That being said, it is frustrating to me that some of the best known jazz albums of all time are only available as BN75 pressings that sound like crap for the most part. If I could drop $30 for BN80 quality pressings of Speak No Evil, The Sidewinder, Go!, Somethin' Else, etc etc I'd do so in an instant. (and yes, I know the 70's Japanese pressings are great but incredibly frustrating trying to track down copies shipped to the US from Japan for a decent price)

This x1000 exactly the same for me.

 

[NewsFedora]

Latest Clue(s) from Storf:

1978
1995

lol well so much for Earth, Wind, and Fire.

 

[uvwxVinyl]

Yeah, BN75 did come from digital files and I guess we all have opinions on how much that matters if mastered well or not. These were mastered by Bernie Grundman and Alan Yoshida so they weren't exactly novices and the European presses were also done at Optimal, just like the BN80s. The EU versions don't deserve nearly the scorn the campaign blanket receives in my opinion. The only terrible BN75 I had was indeed a US press, Sam Rivers' Fuchsia Swing Song and boy is it a stinker, terrible distortion on several passages. I don't know how easy they are to come by from an EU website over there but I honestly think most people would feel like, "yeah, this is what I expect a $20 record to sound like" but of course, YMMV.

Thanks for that perspective. I never realized there was an optimal press and a US press on the BN75. My odds have been pretty good with Optimal so I wouldn't mind trying these.

Having said that, now that they're doing BN80, there is so much to choose from. I'm so happy I don't need to consider shelling out MM money or track down legacy pressings to fill out my collection. I'll probably be set for a while gathering up the BN80s and TP on deals but I'll circle back for the EU BN75s if there are a couple of titles that show up cheap.

I might be totally wrong here but I think a lot of people overthink or over scrutinise a lot of the newer releases. Maybe expectations are just higher now, but before these reissues I wonder how people felt about buying earlier second-hand pressings.

From what I can tell with a lot of the OG BN collectors they will complain about a bumped corner or single a small pop and crackle, but gladly listen to an OG with a defaced waterlogged jacket that hisses all the way through and probably cost $300.

 

[NathanRicaud]

lol well so much for Earth, Wind, and Fire.

NOOOOOOOOO

And no Ohio Players too!