The piano is not hard, brittle or tinkly. If you have big, full-range speakers one of the qualities you may recognize in the sound of the piano is WARMTH. (This should not be surprising the piano was designed to be the single instrument most capable of reproducing the sound of an entire orchestra.) The copies of the album with a piano that sounded lean or hard always ended up having problems with the other instruments as well. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does. No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Natural tonality in the midrange - with all the instruments having the correct timbre.Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low.Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1963 The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing.The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space.Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio.What the best sides of Criss-Cross have to offer is not hard to hear: Old records have it - not often, and certainly not always - but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds. If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for - this sound. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. This Columbia 360 pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. The clarity and transparency are superb throughout. Monk’s piano sounds correct from the highest notes all the way down to the lower register, and the sax sounds tonally right on the money. The bass here is well-defined with real weight and lots of punch. I wish more Blue Note records had this kind of sound - natural, full-bodied, and sweet up top. 4 stars: “Thelonious Monk’s second album for Columbia Records features some of the finest work that Monk ever did in the studio with his ’60s trio and quartet … This is prime Monk for any degree of listener.”.The piano sounds amazing here - natural and dynamic, letting Monk’s passionate playing shine.Columbia records produced by Teo Macero in the early ’60s have consistently open, natural sound – this one from ’63 is no exception.