Fair enough. The first thing to say is that most of the Riverside/Prestige recordings are very good as concerns frequency balance and clarity. The stereo recordings are not very good as concerns image, with insturments typically panned hard left and hard right. Many listeners push the mono button on the preamp or use a mono cartridge. The original issues of these, if you have the dosh to afford them, are almost uniformly great. Which brings us to the reissues. The Milestone/Fantasy reissues are the steal of the century and most are just fantastic; far superior, on the whole, to the OJCs. Some of the material was released as double gatefold albums called "twofers". Later, these were reissued by OJC, which are quite variable, as you have found, many sounding fuzzy, for wont of a better word. The Scorpio reissues, mentioned above, can be identified because they are new and shrink wrapped but have no bar code. They suck. Virtually everything Atlantic did was just great, save for some live stuff. The MJQ recordings are a model of their kind. Both original and reissue Atlantics tend to sound great. Same for the Blue Notes, though avoid anything reprocessed for stereo, from digial masters, or Scorpio. Classic records has done a nice job with most of their reissues, the warping issues not withstanding. You can always look for Rudy Van Gelder as the engineer/mastering engineer and his recordings are great with the exception of the ping-pong stereo effect mentioned above. Most of the Japanese reissues of the material are quite good though perhaps a bit light, the French reissues are great and the Italian are variable. Happy hunting.
