This is a nice Early Riverside stereo pressing (not as pictured) with excellent sound! It’s also a title Mobile Fidelity ruined, and having just played this record, I can see hear how they did it.
First of all, the guitar and the drums are tonally right on the money. Mobile Fidelity of course brightened up both and the results are a phony sounding guitar and a phony sounding drum kit, with tizzy cymbals. (The Wes Montgomery MoFi title has many of the same faults, but it’s not quite as bad as this one.)
The other reason the Mobile Fidelity is such a joke is that this recording inherently has a lot of ill-defined bass. Since Half-Speed mastering causes a loss of bass definition, their pressing is even WORSE in this respect.
Mobile Fidelity rarely understood what an acoustic guitar was supposed to sound like. They blew it on all the Cat Stevens masterpieces, brightening up the guitar which emphasized the “picking” at the expense of the resonating guitar body and vibrating string harmonics.
What makes Byrd At The Gate a good record is the natural acoustic guitar tone. Once you screw that up, what’s left?
An audiophile record. For audiophiles who like phony sounding guitars.
Riverside cut this record, and they knew how to cut it right.
How To Get The Most Out Of Your Records – A Step By Step Guide
We don’t advise it unless you can rinse them with the water we recommend and use the Walker Step 2 for the final stage. Any other process will probably result in a loss of sound quality.
It’s your record, do what you want with it, but after you’ve recleaned it, it will most likely not sound as good as it did when we shipped it to you.
We are HUGE fans of this album at Better Records, but it’s taken us a long time to pull together enough clean copies to make this shootout happen. Boy, was it worth all the trouble!
The presence and immediacy here are staggering. Get the volume just right and June will be standing between your speakers and putting on the performance of a lifetime. This is one of our three or four favorite female vocal albums (along with Clap Hands, Julie Is her Name and not many others!) and this amazingly good copy will show you why — the sound and music are As Good As It Gets.
This early mono pressing is the only way to find the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s missing from modern records. As good as the best of those pressings may be, this record is dramatically more REAL sounding. (more…)
Better than Super Hot Stamper sound on side one of this lovely Victrola reissue from 1960, one of the best in the entire series.
Pay attention to the brass — yes, it may have some tubey smear, but listen to how HUGE and POWERFUL it is! Drop the needle on the first side and watch (or listen) as the sound comes jumping out of your speakers.
Modern records can’t do that.
These Decca-derived recordings are highly sought after, and with good reason. It’s hard to imagine a more wonderful audiophile disc, both in terms of the program and the quality of the sound.
This is the precisely the kind of big, bold, lifelike sound Decca engineers were able to capture on tape, and RCA mastering engineers were able to master from that analog tape, fifty or so years ago. (more…)
Just the third Triple Plus (A+++) copy to ever hit our site — these are TOUGH to find with this kind of sound.
The drums and cymbals sound right (although quite different on these two sides, compare and contrast for yourselves), which is essential on a Rush album. As everyone knows, Neil Peart’s drumming is a major highlight of anything the band does.
If you’re a fan of the band, you know what these guys are about — big-time technical prowess, dizzying effects, powerful solos and so forth. You’ve got to have a very good pressing with serious clarity and lots of energy if you want that magic to come through in the grooves. Many copies we played didn’t let you hear just how hard these guys are shredding… and then what’s the point? If the musicianship gets lost in the mastering, why bother with this band at all? We were looking for copies that didn’t let us forget who we were listening to. Put simply, we wanted copies that melted our faces off, just like this music would do live.
The drums and cymbals sound right (although quite different on these two sides, compare and contrast for yourselves), which is essential on a Rush album. As everyone knows, Neil Peart’s drumming is a major highlight of anything the band does. (more…)
More of the Music of Steely Dan
As of 2023, the yellow label reissues are no longer competitive with the right black label originals. They can still be very good sounding, but they can’t win shootouts, or at least they haven’t in a very long while. Anything is possible, but not any such thing is likely.
Our review from 2009:
It’s time for our annual Countdown to Ecstasy — whatever that is — and for 2009 this copy took TOP HONORS with superb sound on both sides! We just finished doing a huge shootout for this album with well over a dozen copies, winnowed down from close to twenty at the start, and the winner and new champion is this very copy — on the yellow label no less!
We had done shootouts in the past in which all the best copies of this album were on the black label, but this time around the yellow labels came out victorious.
Drop the needle on this 1958 original pressing and you will soon find yourself in the presence of SUPERB Tubey Magical Big Band sound and lively, innovative music. The two have magically combined to entertain and perhaps even thrill you.
If you want to show your friends and neighbors the kind of big, rich, dynamic, natural, relaxed sound that could be had for two bucks and change at most record stores in the ’50s, just throw this bad boy on the table and crank the level. They won’t believe how far backwards recording technology has gone in the last 50-plus years. This record should be all the proof they need. (more…)
