Once upon a time I’d seek out “audiophile” versions of the records I wanted to add to my collection. Back then I made the assumption that a lot, perhaps most, analog audiophiles make these days – that a record made to sound great on an audiophile system was going to sound better than a “standard” version. After all, why would a record company bother to remaster and reissue a record for audiophiles if they weren’t going to make it sound better?

Well, it turns out there are clearly other reasons for record companies to put out audiophile reissues than making great sounding records, with the shocking streak of failures in this area of the record business being clear evidence of that fact. Try as they might, it appears hardly anyone in the record business knows how to make a great sounding record these days. And please believe me when I say this, I really wish someone did. Some of the best versions of the records I’d like to have great sounding copies of have gotten rather expensive, often prohibitively so.

Case it point: Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West, a personal favorite of mine and no doubt of many other jazz fans. Like a lot of the records released by Contemporary Records in the 1950’s and early 60’s, Way Out West is ridiculously well recorded. Roy DuNann, who engineered a great many titles for Contemporary during that time period, had an uncanny knack for presenting musicians with convincing realism. You’d be hard pressed to find a better recorded jazz album than many of those he made during his tenure there, with Way Out West most certainly among his best work.

And when you have a record that’s as well recorded as Way Out West, almost any copy of any version of it is bound to make a good first impression. Great recordings have a way of hiding the shortcomings of what’s done to them after they’re recorded, such as how they’re mastered, and WOW might be one of the best examples of this I can think of. I’ve heard a number of different copies of different versions over the years, and if any one of them had been the only version I’d ever heard, it likely would have shown me enough of the recording to impress me.

Several years ago I did a shootout with a few different pressings of WOW and ultimately decided that the 70’s era yellow label I owned at the time, one that had been remastered at Sheffield Lab, was the best of the bunch. That record on that iteration of my system, a system that’s changed a good deal since, beat out a Fantasy records OJC and a very early black label mono pressing. At that time, I misidentified the OJC as being from the 80’s. In fact, it was a much more recent Fantasy OJC reissue from 2009.

I bought my own copy of the 2009 OJC recently and spent some more time playing it on my current system. I’m happy to say, I wasn’t too far off the mark on my earlier assessment. It’s got the big, surprisingly tubey bass and drums I remember, but the saxophone lacks clarity and ambience. It’s also cut a bit too loud, hurting the dynamics.

I passed on my Sheffield 70’s remaster a while back in favor of another 70’s yellow label that I prefer. This copy sounds better, particularly on side 2, which has an earlier stamper and was likely pressed from some of the older metalwork. The first side on this copy has a later stamper number, with the matrix etched rather than stamped like on the earliest pressings. Revisiting this copy recently I found the drums and bass on the first side sounded a bit more “stuck in the speakers” than on the OJC,  but the horn sounded clearer, more natural and with cleaner transient edges.

Meanwhile the second side of this yellow label, the side with the earlier stamped matrix, was until very recently by far the best side of this album I’d heard. It combined the size and weight of the OJC with more transparency and better tonal accuracy. It presented the bass with lifelike size, and I could make out its shape and hear deeper “into” Brown’s performance. Similarly Manne’s drums showed themselves to be bigger and with greater presence and impact.

I started to realize that while I could always appreciate that, as jazz albums go, WOW combined a great performance with a great recording, more than 30 years after first hearing it on an OJC CD I was just now discovering just how great. The combination of some recent system improvements and this earlier yellow label copy was revealing the music in ways I never knew were possible.

I decided to see if I could find a clean copy of an even earlier pressing, one that would give me 2 sides that rivaled the second side on my yellow label. I also wanted to see if I could find one that didn’t break the bank. The earliest black labels of WOW can sell for hundreds. And even though the black label I had heard, the one I had on loan for my earlier shootout and that I wrote about was a mono, and not one of the stereo versions I was seeking, my dislike for that early mono made me wary of these early black labels.

Of course, I could have been completely wrong about that early mono pressing. Maybe it was great and I just couldn’t appreciate its strengths on my stereo at the time. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about a record. I shudder to think of all the records I sold off over the years that I was sure were shite and very well could have been killer.

But I can’t look back. Especially now that I’m convinced that the right stereo pressing of Way Out West is the one to get, and the early stamped stampers are the right pool to draw from. I found a very good price on a 60’s green label repressing from a seller in Japan and was astonished to receive a 60+ year old record that literally looked like someone bought it and carefully opened the shrink wrap just the day before.

Records in this good of shape often arouse suspicion in me. Pristine copies of great records sometimes have defects, or just sound bad, which is why they’ve barely been played or, in this case, even touched. But not only was the record not defective, it didn’t sound bad either. In fact, I soon discovered it was rather good sounding!

I also discovered something else about WOW, and something I could say about a lot of records made from extremely high quality recordings. It can be very hard, perhaps impossible, to accurately evaluate what is a “good” copy and what isn’t until we’ve actually heard a great one. And as I mentioned earlier, this recording is so well done, many copies out there are going to sound “good.” But it wasn’t until I heard this early green label pressing that I could start to discern what a great copy of WOW sounds like.

Side one of my yellow label hints at it. In fact, all of the yellow labels I’ve heard do to some extent, including the Sheffield mastered version. They have a clean, clear and transparent top end and midrange but not a lot of bass. Before I had a pair of speakers that could reproduce bass, I had no idea what I was missing. When I got speakers with more bass, what was missing started to reveal itself. And when I added a subwoofer and I could hear size and depth with greater ease, records without a lot of low end became much easier to identify.

Now that I have speakers that can reproduce bass much better, I am able to hear what’s missing from the yellow label. I can hear the bass notes on it just fine and make out the basic outline of the instrument in the soundstage. I can hear Brown plucking the strings and I can clearly appreciate the sweet tone of each note. But it wasn’t until I heard this green label that I could begin to soak in the warm, woody depth of the instrument and appreciate, more fully, just how BIG the bass is on this recording. It sounds, in fact, remarkably like a full sized fully fleshed-out stand up bass.

As do the drums, which now sound at least a third bigger than they do on the yellow label, and at least as much weightier and more full on impact. On the green label, the drum kit presents as the size of a real drum kit, and the echo of the kit in the recording studio sounds significantly more pronounced. When Manne whacks the drums, I hear it clearly in the background of Rollins’s Saxophone, while I hear the horn, as Rollins moves toward and away and side to side from the mic, moving toward and away from the drum kit and the bass.

This hits squarely on the reason why I think this record is really meant to be heard in stereo. With the earlier yellow label I had it was hard for me to discern this. The horn just seemed to be playing from the left speaker and the drums and bass from the right. Is that just the mono recording of each mixed into 2 different channels? I couldn’t always tell.

But with the added bottom end this green label copy brings to the table, I’m hearing the studio space and everything in it a whole lot better, and I’m relishing all the more the insane chemistry these musicians have on this record. Musically I could always appreciate how dialed in Rollins, Manne and Brown are on WOW, but now I can actually hear that in the sound of the record, and this brings the performance and the experience of listening to it to a whole new level.

And what I find particularly extraordinary about this record is that the overall sound on this copy is both wonderful and wonderfully ordinary at the same time. It turns out that as we build our analog system to be better at reproducing recorded music, and as we find records to play that excel at delivering the best account of the recordings on them, we start to see what the endgame of audio is. And that endgame, it turns out, is simply this – music that sounds remarkably alive, wonderfully free of artifice and achingly, yet somehow unsurprisingly, musical. It turns out, the endgame of analog audio is just music that truly sounds like live music, and nothing more than that.

I suppose at this point I should shine a light on the elephant in the room. You might be thinking – “Hey, what about the 2003 Analogue Productions reissue? What about all of the Japanese reissues? What about the 2018 Craft Recordings reissue?” And let’s not forget the all tube “mastered from the original tapes” 2020 reissue from the Electric Recording Company, not to mention the earlier Fantasy OJC’s from the 80’s. Honestly, I haven’t heard any of these, although I’d certainly welcome the chance to.

Therefore it’s possible, based on my own earlier contention that we need to hear “great” to know what copies actually sound “good,” that without my having heard these other versions, I may still have yet to hear what a great copy of Way Out West sounds like. If you have a copy of WOW that I haven’t mentioned and you feel strongly it’s the cat’s pajamas, PLEASE! SEND IT TO ME AND I’LL PAY POSTAGE BOTH WAYS TO HEAR IT! I’ll also be more than happy to write about it and post a review on this site.

In the meantime, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a good copy of one of the early, stereo mastered versions of Way Out West is as good as this record is going to get, which is pretty damn good. I may be proven wrong and wouldn’t mind a bit if I was, but based on this most recent outing with the album, I’d be downright shocked if that happened.