Month: June 2018

The Mehta Planets – Sealed with the Pioneer Booklet

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

Factory Sealed CS 6734 with the super rare Pioneer spacecraft booklet inside the shrink!

There’s a very good chance this is the last such copy on the planet. I have never seen one before, and I remember when this record came out, so probably few were made with this special booklet included.

I’m guessing it has about a dozen pages or so, and probably talks about the Pioneer mission to Jupiter.

“Launched on 2 March 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel through the Asteroid belt, and the first spacecraft to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. Famed as the most remote object ever made by man through most of its mission, Pioneer 10 is now over 8 billion miles away.” 

Johnny Hodges & Wild Bill Davis – Blue Rabbit from 1964

  • This KILLER jazz pressing boasts shootout winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from first note to last
  • The sound here is Tubey Magical, lively and clear, with three-dimensionality that goes deep and fills the listening room from wall to wall
  • This copy plays on relatively quiet vinyl, Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus throughout
  • “One of altoist Johnny Hodges’ many solo records in the 1960s… Tasty and swinging music.” – Allmusic

For us audiophiles both the sound and the music here are wonderful. If you’re looking to demonstrate just how good 1963-64 All Tube Analog sound can be, this killer copy will do the trick. (more…)

Steely Dan – Donald Gets Dynamic on Rikki

More of the Music of Steely Dan

More Albums with Key Tracks for Critical Listening

This is one knockout recording.

Having done shootouts for every Steely Dan title, I can say that sonically this one has no equal in their canon. 

Which is really saying something, since Becker and Fagen are known to be audiophiles themselves and real sticklers for sound. No effort in the recording of this album was spared, that I can tell you without fear of contradiction.

They sweated the details on this one. The mix is PERFECTION. 

But you would never know it by playing the average pressing of this album, which is dull, compressed and dead as the proverbial doornail.

It’s positively criminal the way this amazingly well-recorded music sounds on the typical LP pressing. And how can you possibly be expected to appreciate the music when you can’t hear it right?

The reason we audiophiles go through the trouble of owning and tweaking our temperamental equipment is that we know how hard it is to appreciate good music when it doesn’t sounds good.

Bad sound is a barrier to understanding and enjoyment, to us audiophiles anyway.  How can you like what you can’t hear properly?

Rikki – Dead as a Doornail or Dynamic as Hell?

First, a Warmup Test

By far the biggest hit on this album and one of the biggest for the band, it’s also one of the clearest indicators of Hot Stamper Sound. The Horace Silver inspired intro is at its best when you can easily hear the acoustic guitar in the left channel doubling the piano. On most copies it’s blurry and dull, which causes it to get lost in the mix. Transparent copies pull it out in the open where it belongs.

Now On to the Real Test

That’s the first test, but the real test for this track is how well the (surprisingly) DYNAMIC chorus is handled. On a properly mastered and pressed copy, Fagen’s singing in the chorus is powerful and very present. He is RIGHT THERE, full of energy and drive, challenging the rest of the band to keep up with him. And they do! The best copies demonstrate what a lively group of musicians he has backing him on this track. (If you know anything about Steely Dan’s recordings, you know the guys in these sessions are the best of the best.)

Check out the big floor tom that gets smacked right before the first chorus. On the best copies the whomp factor is off the scale.

DOA Is Par for the Course

Shocking as it may seem, most copies of this album are DOA on this track. They’re severely compressed — they never come to life, they never get LOUD. The result? Fagen and the band sound bored. And that feeling is contagious.

Of course, most audiophiles have no idea how dynamic this recording is because they’ve never heard a good pressing. Only a handful of the copies we played had truly powerful dynamics.

These are Pretzel Logics with far more life than I ever dreamed possible.

Dexter Gordon – One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

Hot Stamper Pressings of Core Jazz Titles Available Now

  • You’ll find outstanding sound on both sides of this vintage Blue Note pressing
  • With its presence, clarity, space and timbral accuracy, this is guaranteed to be one of the best sounding jazz records you’ve heard in a very long time
  • One of our very favorite Blue Note recordings for both music and sound, a Dexter Gordon Classic of soulful hard bop
  • Turn it up good and loud and it’s as if you are right up front at one of the best ’60s jazz concerts imaginable
  • This is a Must Own Jazz Album from 1964 that belongs in every jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

Both the sax and the trumpet sound unbelievably good — airy and breathy with lots of body and clearly audible leading edge transients.

It’s hard to find a Blue Note where the horns aren’t either too smooth or too edgy, but here they have just the right amount of bite. The overall sound is open, spacious, tonally correct from top to bottom and totally free from distortion. (more…)

Roxy Music – A Heavy Vinyl Winner!

More of the Music of Roxy Music

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Roxy Music

Sonic Grade: B-

This is a very old review, and I cannot even tell exactly what pressing this is now that I have gone back and read it. I believe it is a heavy vinyl pressing with the red Polydor label.

Hey, this is a good sounding pressing! I had to pull out my best imports to beat it, which they did handily of course, but the typical audiophile trying to find a pressing superior to this one will have to do a fair bit of homework in order to succeed.

We had multiple copies of Islands, Polydors, Atcos, Reprises and one copy of the Heavy Vinyl import I used to like. This pressing trounced most of them, and it’s cheap. 

I highly recommend it to anyone who likes Art Rock from the ’70s and is never going to lay out the kind of bread our Hot Stamper pressings command. For around $20 you just can’t beat it.

King Crimson – In The Wake Of Poseidon – Heavy on the Mellotron

  • King Crimson’s second studio album debuts on the site with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides
  • This pressing is Big and Tubey, with clear, breathy vocals, especially critical to the success of the a capella opening track, “Peace – A Beginning”
  • This lovely original Island Pink Label British Import LP has a beautiful textured cover and plays as quiet as we can find them, Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus throughout
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The record…, however, has made an impressive show of transmuting material that worked on stage (“Mars” aka “The Devil’s Triangle”) into viable studio creations, and “Cadence and Cascade” may be the prettiest song the group ever cut.”

If you love the sound of a vintage All Tube recording of the mellotron — whether by Led Zeppelin or The Moody Blues — you will find that Robin Thompson has got hold of a very good sounding one here. Thompson is of course the engineer for the first King Crimson album, so his recording skills as regards the instrument are well established.

Note that the British Island pressings for this album as well as the first are by far the best sounding, assuming you have a good one. What is interesting about early Island LPs is just how bad some of them are. And let me tell you, we’ve paid the price in time and money to find out just how bad some Island Pink Labels can sound. (more…)

King Crimson / Lizard – Heavy on the Mellotron

More of the Music of King Crimson

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Prog Rock Albums

Every bit the sonic equal of the first album, if you love colorful Big Production Jazzy Prog Rock (with mellotron!) is your thing you can’t go wrong here

Standard Operating Procedures

What are the criteria by which a record like this should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, and so on down through the list.

When we can get all, or most all, of the qualities above to come together on any given side we provisionally award it a grade of “contender.” Once we’ve been through all our copies on one side we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides matched up.

It may not be rocket science, but it is a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them. 

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing — or your money back.

AMG 4 Star Review

Lizard is very consciously jazz-oriented — the influence of Miles Davis (particularly Sketches of Spain) being especially prominent — and very progressive, even compared with the two preceding albums. The pieces are longer and have extensive developmental sections, reminiscent of classical music, and the lyrics are more ornate, while the subject matter is more exotic and rarified — epic, Ragnarok-like battles between good and evil that run cyclically.

The doom-laden mood of the first two albums is just as strong, except that the music is prettier; the only thing missing is a sense of humor… At the time of its release, some critics praised Lizard for finally breaking with the formula and structure that shaped the two preceding albums, but overall it’s an acquired taste.

The Knack – If You Like Power Pop, This Is a Must Own Album from 1979

More of  the Music of The Knack

This Monster Power Pop Debut by the Knack is an AMAZINGLY well-recorded album, with the kind of Wall to Wall Big Beat Live Rock Sound that rivals Back in Black and Nevermind — if you’re lucky enough to have a copy that sounds like this! (If you’re not then it doesn’t.)

My Sharona is simply STUNNING here. You just can’t record drums and bass any better!

And let’s not forget the song Lucinda. It’s got exactly the same incredibly meaty, grungy, ballsy sound that Back in Black does, but it managed to do it in 1979, a year earlier!

Mike Chapman produced this album and clearly he is an audiophile production genius. With a pair of Number One charting, amazing sounding Pop albums back to back — Blondie’s Parallel Lines in 1978 and this album early the next year — how much better could he get? The answer is: None more better.

Come to Life, Would You!

So many copies we played of The Knack just didn’t come to life the way the good ones do. Especially noticeable on many of the pressings we played was a lack of bass foundation and punch. When the bass comes in at the opening of My Sharona it should make your neighbors come knocking. On most copies the effect is, to be charitable, less than startling, especially if you’ve heard it sound the way it can on our Hot Stampers. Let me tell you, THEY ROCK.

Bass, Man

Dropping the needle on the average copy we kept asking ourselves where the bass was! Only the best copies let you hear the bass with all its power and glory intact. (Of course, you have to have the kind of dynamic full-range system that can reproduce that kind of power down low; we never tire of making the case for big dynamic speakers because we know what a THRILL it is to hear a record like this played good and loud on them.)

Real Studio Space

One of the qualities we heard on the more transparent copies is huge studio space around the drum kit, especially the kick. We love that “unbaffled” sound; it lets the long-delayed reflections off the back wall be heard clearly. Until we got our EAR 324 in 2007 we couldn’t get a good picture of just what was happening in the studio, but now those reflections are as clear as a bell on record after record, from The Planets to Physical Graffiti.

The advent of top quality stand-alone phono stages is, in our opinion, one of the most important revolutions in audio in recent times. Room treatments that allow that three-dimensional studio space to be recreated in your very own living room are another.

Side One

Let Me Out 
Your Number or Your Name
Oh Tara 
(She’s So) Selfish 
Maybe Tonight 
Good Girls Don’t

Side Two

My Sharona 
Heartbeat 
Siamese Twins (The Monkey and Me)
Lucinda 
That’s What the Little Girls Do 
Frustrated

Count Basie / Chairman of the Board – The Reissues that Beat the Originals (and of course the Classic Records Remaster)

  • A Shootout Winning copy with Triple Plus (A+++) sound on the first side and Double Plus (A++) sound on the second
  • From first note to last, this copy is big, clear, rich and lively, with huge amounts of space around the band
  • Forget the honky, hard-sounding Roulette originals, and of course the second-rate Classic Records pressing – this reissue is the way to go
  • 4 1/2 stars: “This 1958 date for Roulette was a rare chance for the orchestra to perform on its own, and listeners to hear how powerful the band could be when its concentration was undiverted… The record is admittedly heavy on the blues, but it’s a brassy, powerful vision of the blues… A dynamic date, it shows the ‘new testament’ edition of Basie’s orchestra in top form.”

This reissue is spacious, open, transparent, rich and sweet. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the added benefit of mastering using the more modern cutting equipment of the ’70s. We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of 30+ years ago, not the dubious and too often disastrous modern mastering of today. 

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title as you will surely hear for yourself on these superb sides. We were impressed with the fact that these pressings excel in so many areas of reproduction. What was odd about it — odd to most audiophiles but not necessarily to us — was just how rich and Tubey Magical the reissue can be on the right pressing.

This leads me to think that most of the natural, full-bodied, lively, clear, rich sound of the album is on the tape, and that all one has to do to get that vintage sound on to a record is simply to thread up the tape on the right machine and hit play. (more…)

1970 – It Was a Very Good Year, Especially for Dave Mason

masonalone

More of the Music of Dave Mason

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Dave Mason

This album appears to be criminally underrated as music nowadays, having fallen from favor with the passage of time.

It is a surely a MASTERPIECE that belongs in any Rock Collection worthy of the name. Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s not a scrap of filler here.

The recording by Bruce Botnick is hard to fault as well.

1970 was a great time in music. Some of the best albums released that year (in no particular order):

  • Tea for the Tillerman,
  • Bridge Over Troubled Water,
  • Moondance,
  • Sweet Baby James,
  • Tumbleweed Connection,
  • After the Goldrush,
  • The Yes Album,
  • McCartney / Self-Titled,
  • Elton John / Self-Titled,
  • Morrison / His Band And Street Choir,
  • Deja Vu,
  • Workingman’s Dead,
  • Tarkio,
  • Stillness,
  • Let It Be — need I go on?

Even in such illustrious company — I defy anyone to name ten albums of comparable quality to come out in any year — Alone Together ranks as one of the best releases of 1970.