THIS IS AN UPDATED VERSION OF AN ARTICLE POSTED IN JANUARY 2021.
As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, I spend some time on Instagram and follow numerous collectors there, most of them jazz collectors. I’ll admit that my time spent on IG is in part to seek out people who might find THIS site interesting, and it seems that jazz collectors make up the majority of the collectors posting on the IG these days, and that they TEND to have better systems to play their records on.
I’m always interested in seeing what other audiophile collectors, or collectors with audiophile tendencies, are listening to these days. Over the past few years I’ve seen quite a few collectors posting Blue Note Tone Poet Series reissues and invariably praising the sound quality.
If you’ve read just about ANYTHING on this site you’ll have at least some idea of my skepticism with regards modern reissues, “audiophile” reissues in particular. But I’m sure I’m not alone among collectors in holding out hope that someday, someone will figure out how to make new records sound remotely as good as the best old ones.
A while back a client gave me an Amazon gift certificate and as I was trying to figure out what to buy with it, I saw an opportunity. I almost NEVER buy used records on Amazon as the prices are invariably inflated and the grading often hard to discern, but it’s not a terrible place to buy new records. So I scrolled through my never ending want list and landed on a couple of titles from the Blue Note Tone Poet Series.
Here’s what it says about this series of reissues on Discogs:
In honor of Blue Note Records’ 80th Anniversary, in 2019, the Jazz label launched the Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Reissue Series. Blue Note President Don Was brought in “Tone Poet” Joe Harley—co-founder and co-producer of the acclaimed Music Matters Ltd. audiophile vinyl series—to produce this new series of all-analog, mastered-from-the-original-master-tape 180 gram audiophile vinyl reissues in deluxe gatefold packaging. Mastering is by Kevin Gray (Cohearent Audio) and vinyl is being manufactured at Record Technology Incorporated (RTI).
As I mentioned, quite a few collectors on Instagram have recommended these, including one guy I know for certain is a fairly serious audiophile. So in the interest of hope for the future of reissues and self edification I bought a couple of titles – Lee Morgan’s Cornbread and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers’ Roots & Herbs.
So often when I hear collectors gushing about a new vinyl reissue they’ve just bought they mention how nice the packaging is, and the Tone Poets are no exception. The jackets ARE very, very nice, AND built to last. In fact, the first thing I thought taking the record out of the jacket was that it was too bad the ORIGINAL jackets weren’t this nice. I mean, these jackets look and feel like they could last 100 years! And I’m being completely serious!
Speaking of serious, this is a good time to mention this. If you haven’t already discovered this on your own, let me tell you, an analog system can sound SO far beyond anything you’ve ever thought even POSSIBLE that if you enjoy collecting vinyl and you ARE serious about great sound you are going to want to do EVERYTHING you can, money, time and spouse acceptance permitting, to realize the full potential of analog in your system.
The caveat is, you need the RIGHT records to do it with. I’ve just made a series of substantial upgrades and I can only sit back and MARVEL at how good my system is sounding right now. When I play one of my best sounding records the music coming from my speakers is literally a thing to BEHOLD.
But when I play a NOT GOOD sounding record, my system sounds similarly, NOT GOOD. In fact, with the WRONG record my system can sound downright BAD. If I’d never acquired some seriously good sounding records I would not have made the choices I’ve made with my system (more on this HERE) because, frankly, I don’t think I would have even gone all in with analog.
The other day I saw an article written by another blogger making the case for vinyl as MORE than an elitist throwback fetish. This author argues that vinyl records sound better than their equivalent in digital reproduction, and that they give us something tangible in an age where SO MUCH is virtual.
Okay fair enough, I can’t argue with the tangibility of vinyl records, although that argument seems to reinforce the criticism that vinyl is fetishism. But do vinyl records really sound better? Sometimes yes, but MUCH more often than not, not really. Not when the percentage of poor sounding records in the marketplace, vintage and new, is so startlingly high. And this includes some jazz originals, I might add.
I’d argue that the “audiophile” reissue supports the fetishization of vinyl much more than the realization of higher sound quality. If anything, this type of record moves us further away from good sound. If I’d gone down the road of buying “audiophile” reissues over the past few years while I’d been making system upgrades I’d now have a lot of the WRONG records and a system that comes nowhere near to living up to its full potential to show for it.
And if you’re still wondering, as one Audiogon forum contributor was just a short time ago, if you can get better sound from that CD player or high quality DAC that’s sounding SO DAMN GOOD to you than you can from a GREAT RECORD and a good analog front end, then you have YET to hear what a GREAT SOUNDING vinyl record can really do, and therefore you have NO IDEA how good your system and your records can sound. At least not yet!
Now this may be just fine with you. As a friend of mine told me just the other day – “my system is sounding EXACTLY like I want it to sound.” Fair enough, but then I have to tell you that as much as I appreciate you being here and as much as I’m eager to attract more readers, you’re completely wasting your time on this site. This site is for people who recognize their system DOESN’T sound exactly like they want it to sound and who are strongly inclined, even COMPELLED, to change that.
So just in case the first part of the last paragraph describes you, I’ll do you a favor and save you some time reading through the long story and cut to the chase. The Blue Note Tone Poet Reissues do not sound good to me. Both of the titles I mention above were disappointing for exactly the same reasons, and I’d honestly be astonished if any of them really delivers in a serious way.
DOES THIS MEAN I’M SAYING THEY SOUND BAD? NO, not at all, so PLEASE! Those of you who LOVE THE TONE POETS! TRY to see past the annoyance and perhaps even (given the comments I’ve received on this, some not fit to print!) THE RAGE building inside you and HEAR what I’m saying. The Tone Poets are NOT bad records! They are, IMO and based on my experience playing the 2 that I had to play, a relatively small sample size I’m fully aware, not records that deliver ambience, transparency and ALIVENESS – the qualities that I LIVE FOR and that many, NOT ALL, but many vintage records DO have.
Now you may be saying to yourself – “Wait a minute! Aren’t the Tone Poets mastered from the original tape? Didn’t Kevin Gray take a very light touch with the mastering in order to bring out the sound of the master tape in as true a way as possible? How can a mass produced, vintage record with dubious mastering credentials pressed on lousy vinyl compete with that?”
I wish I had a good answer to that question. All I can say is that sometimes in audio and quite often with records, the conventional wisdom just doesn’t hold true. Originals always sound better than reissues. Digitally mastered records can’t sound better than all analog mastered records. Remasters done from the original analog tapes on modern mastering equipment with its modern technological advantages are the gold standard for sound quality in vinyl. Any of these ring a bell?
Folks, when it comes to analog audio, the conventional wisdom IS the “fake news.” These “rules” ARE the “alternative facts.” But BY ALL MEANS, don’t take my word for it. Get your system firing on all cylinders, do some shootouts and see for yourself! If you come to different conclusions that I have, well, at least you’ve come to those conclusions based on experience rather than simply following the conventional wisdom or parroting the views of others who are, supposedly, in the know.
When my Tone Poets arrived from Amazon, I put on Cornbread and listened to quite a bit of it. Fortunately, even though I found the sound underwhelming I could still appreciate what a wonderful album it is. In fact, the longer I listened to it the more I began to look past my first impressions and the more I started to second guess myself. I was starting to hear some things I liked and see that this reissue was not entirely without its merits.
For one, the horns do have good tonal quality to them. The piano has decent weight, as does the rhythm section and the overall presentation makes the individual parts easy to follow and appreciate. After a while I started to wonder whether I wasn’t being a bit too harsh on this record.
So I pulled out my Liberty pressing of Cornbread for comparison, and from the very first note this copy showed me exactly what the BNTPS reissue was missing – LIFE! That stuck in the speakers sound was gone and the performances soared, brought suddenly into my living room with the sound of the Van Gelder studio and its hallowed space around them. A SOUND, it was now clear, that was conspicuously absent from the Cornbread Tone Poet reissue; and a sound, that is, the sound of a group of musicians living and breathing in a studio or live venue space, that EVERY great sounding record has and that EVERY great sounding analog system has the ability to convey.
Now apparently, back in the day when Rudy Van Gelder was first cutting his recordings for Blue Note, obliged to produce records that would play on the rinky dink turntables of the day, he deliberately made mastering choices that would make them easier to play and enjoy on those turntables. Apparently, and I have no idea if the original pressings of Cornbread are an example of this, but apparently, he did things such as rolling off the lower frequencies, deliberately compressing the sound, and sometimes even used second generations tapes to cut the lacquers.
Clearly I’m no mastering engineer nor do I play one on TV, and while my knowledge of the process is growing, it is still limited. But I DO have a pair of trained ears in very good working order, A LOT of experience playing and comparing different pressings of many titles and a stereo that is built to bring out the best in the best sounding pressings. Therefore, regardless of what Mr. Van Gelder was or wasn’t doing in the mastering room back in the day when he cut Cornbread or any of it’s contempories, all I can say is, my Liberty pressing of Cornbread sounds a good deal better to me than the Tone Poet reissue.
Nowhere was this difference more apparent than with the track “Our Man Higgins.” The ENERGY on this song pins me to my chair! It stirs something inside of me – a feeling of ANTICIPATION of what’s to come. Billy Higgins and Larry Ridley drive this track along at breakneck speed and I found myself practically reaching for my seat belt!
But when I put the Tone Poet reissue on, this feeling was nowhere to be found. Where was the LIFE? Where was the EXCITEMENT? Not on this record that’s for sure.
Clearly I’m not recommending the Tone Poets, but I don’t want to discourage collectors from buying them. After all, and as I’ve experienced for myself, on some systems they actually sound pretty good. Case it point, I was at a friend’s recently and he has the Tone Poet of Paul Chambers’s Bass On Top. On his system – VPI Classic 3 with 3-D tonearm and high quality MC cartridge played through a Mark Levinson phono, pre and amp out of a pair of nice KEF monitors, I liked the sound of the Tone Poet of Bass On Top!
But did it come to life in the way a KILLER sounding copy Kind of Blue that I had tracked down, cleaned and vetted on my system for him did? No, it did not. Although I would add that that copy of Kind of Blue did not surpass his Tone Poet of Bass On Top as mightily as I would have expected. Then again, I didn’t hear it on my system and mine is a bit further along that his.
This is AN IMPORTANT POINT that I will try to articulate here as clearly as I can. You may very well like, or even LOVE the sound of the Tone Poets on your system. But as any audiophile knows, some systems are just more revealing than others, and SOME systems are SO revealing that you begin to discover that records you THOUGHT you liked, even LOVED, ACTUALLY don’t sound all that good after all. This has happened to me now more times than I care to count and as discouraging as it can be, it does represent progress in analog audio – SERIOUS progress!
IN FACT, I’ll do an about face here and actually RECOMMEND audiophiles buy at least one Tone Poet, preferably one they own a vintage copy of. YES PLEASE! BUY A TONE POET or two and shoot them out against your copies and see for yourself what you discover. BY ALL MEANS! DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT!
Great sounding records show us what our system does well and what it doesn’t do well. Based on that we can find ways to improve the sound and make those great sounding records sound EVEN BETTER! But I seriously doubt you will ever get a BNTPS record to sound even better than okay, and I predict that if you try you will spend a lot of money doing it and ultimately fail, likely finding yourself further away from a truly great sounding analog system than when you started. But again, don’t take my word for it, buy one and FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF!
These are, unfortunately, the cold hard facts of analog. The modern reissue may be new, nicely packaged and shine brightly with marketing hyperbole, but these records are, in my experience, almost invariably mixed bag of mediocrity, at best. Does that mean we all need to pony up big bucks for expensive original pressings? Fortunately no, as I illustrated a while back in a post about Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West. In fact, there a A LOT of great jazz reissues out there, many of them that improve on the sound of the originals, sometimes by a significant margin.
It does mean that we need to do some legwork to find a good sounding copy, and if you’re not interested in doing the legwork then you have Better Records as a resource. You can also reach out to me and see if I have any suggestions if there’s a specific title you’re looking for. I’ve been searching for and FINDING some great sounding copies of some great records lately for myself and others and I’d be happy to discuss with you how that would work and see if it’s of interest. Just leave a comment and I’ll contact you by email.
In the meantime, as much as I wish it it were otherwise, serious analog audiophiles should be dubious of the consensus view on these BNTPS reissues, no matter how enthusiastic and sincere. On the bright side, The Blue Note Tone Poet Series reissues, along with your best vintage records, provide a wonderful opportunity to hear and begin to understand what the modern remaster is getting right and what it’s getting wrong, not to mention some great music to listen to while doing it.