Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

This White Hot Stamper original LP goes BEYOND DEMO DISC sound. What that means exactly I’m not sure, but I know it when I hear it, and this record has THAT SOUND.

We had no choice but to award this side one the very rare A with FOUR pluses A++++. Side one of this copy has ENERGY and LIFE we have never heard before.

No other copy had this kind of OFF THE CHARTS sound on either side, which means we feel no compunction awarding this side one our Ultimate Rating of A Quadruple Plus (A++++). Only a handful of records over the course of the last few years have earned such a grade, certainly no more than ten, and if memory serves there has never been a record with Four Pluses on both sides; that would be just too extraordinary, the Black Swan incarnate.

• Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
• We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
• Nowadays we often place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
• When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
• Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

This Side One

Going back to our best Hot Stamper Triple Plus contenders for the final shootout round, we dropped the needle on this one and it could not have taken three seconds to know that this copy was BEYOND amazing, truly in a league of its own.

Side Two

Side Two was right up there with the best, but in our final round of shootouts we had to deduct a few points for a subtle lack of extension at the very top (12 to 15K) that on the best of the best lets the cymbals shine above the din below. Without ten or twenty copies to play you will have a hard time finding one like this, we can assure you of that.

We went on to talk about why this challenging record is such a valuable Test Disc.

If everything is cookin’ and you’re at the top of your game, this is the album for you. It’s an Audiophile Extravaganza for all the right reasons. To be properly expressed, every musical idea needs the right instrumental complement, and each instrument in that complement needs to be recorded properly to produce the desired effect, the one that will express the idea. This album is overflowing with fresh musical ideas, layers and layers and layers of them. I hear more of them every time I have occasion to revisit a new batch of Hot Copies.

Which, by the way, was two years ago. (I’m telling you, I’m afraid to play this record!) Having recently made a string of important changes to the system, I thought I was ready for this one. Boy, was I wrong. I spent the next two days playing this record over and over again, at fairly high levels mind you, while rearranging all the room treatments. The goal was to balance the sound from top to bottom — to make it as seamless as possible — while retaining the presence and dynamics I knew the best copies exhibited.

There is no question that this band, their producers and their engineers sweated every detail of this remarkable recording. They went the distance. In the end they brought in Alan Parsons to mix it, and Doug Sax to master it. The result is a masterpiece, an album that stands above all others. It’s not prog. It’s not pop. It’s not rock. It’s Ambrosia — the food of the gods.

The one album that I would say it most resembles is Dark Side of the Moon. (Note the Parsons connection.) Like DSOTM, Ambrosia is neither Pop nor Prog but a wonderful mix of both and more.

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back on it over the last thirty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with a handful of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile in the first place, and stuck with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music like this sound so good?