More Perry Como

• KILLER sound throughout with both sides earning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
• The overall sound here is incredibly big, rich and Tubey Magical with wonderfully sweet and breathy vocals
• Exceptionally quiet vinyl throughout with both sides playing Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus
• “The leadoff track, “The Songs I Love,” sets the tone for everything that follows, and, not surprisingly, it turns out that pop standards are the songs Como loves. The Songs I Love was a commercially successful album aimed at fans of The Perry Como Show, to whom it is recommended.” – All Music

This vintage RCA pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. 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. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

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. 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.

What amazing sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1963
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. 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.

What We Listen For on The Songs I Love

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

The Songs I Love
(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco
Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words)
Slightly Out Of Tune (Desafinado)
This Is All I Ask
The Hawaiian Wedding Song

Side Two

Days Of Wine And Roses
Carnival
My Coloring Book
I Wanna Be Around
When I Lost You
What Kind Of Fool Am I?

AMG Review

Perry Como hosted an hour-long program on NBC TV until 1963, the year that Songs I Love was released. A regular feature of the show was that Como would croon a favorite song while seated on a distinctive set that spelled out “Mr. C.” A photo of the set adorns the cover of Songs I Love, and the album aims to reproduce the effect of that segment (which producers Hugo & Luigi describe as “one of the few great traditions in television”) over a dozen soft ballads such as “Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)” and “This Is All I Ask.” The leadoff track, “The Songs I Love,” sets the tone for everything that follows, and, not surprisingly, it turns out that pop standards are the songs Como loves. The Songs I Love was a commercially successful album aimed at fans of The Perry Como Show, to whom it is recommended.