Month: June 2020

Gary McFarland – Does The Sun Really Shine On The Moon?

Look at the track listing — these are pop tunes by The Beatles and The Beach Boys set to jazzy arrangements, perfect for your bachelor pad. Enjoy this one for what it is — enchanting pop tunes without the vocals, superbly well recorded and well played by jazz guys who know how to have fun with these kinds of songs. 

DCC did this title on CD and if you want one just drop us a note and we will include one with your order gratis.

This copy is dramatically more open and spacious than any of the other copies we’ve heard. The organ and bass are especially well recorded.

Drop the needle on God Only Knows to get a taste of how good side one sounds. (more…)

Gould / West Point Symphony / Fennell (SR 90220)

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

RFR-3/RFR-1. Quiet and Near Mint! Superb sound.

Explosive, dynamic, big sound. The music on side 2 by Bennett is especially enjoyable.

Performed by the Eastman Wind Ensemble under the direction of Frederick Fennell. This performance also includes Bennett’s ’Symphonic Songs For Band’, Williams’ ’Fanfare and Allegro’, and Work’s “Autumn Walk”.

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Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention / Absolutely Free

More Frank Zappa

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Frank Zappa

What to listen for you ask? That’s an easy one. Just listen for the best sounding Mothers record ever made, because that’s what the best copies can (and should) sound like.

Absolutely Free is much bigger, smoother, richer, livelier and more free from harshness, dryness and distortion than any other album we’ve ever played from Zappa’s early period, pre-Waka Jawaka let’s say. The only other records I can think of that can sound remotely as good as Absolutely Free are Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968) and Hot Rats (1969), and even then I really don’t think they are quite in this league.

  • BY FAR the best copy to ever hit the site – White Hot on side one and Nearly White on side two
  • You will not believe how rich and Tubey Magical this copy is, and yet so CLEAR and undistorted
  • If you’ve suffered through reissues or the dreadful CD you are going to flip out over the sound of this copy
  • 4 1/2 Stars: “By turns hilarious, inscrutable, and virtuosically complex, Absolutely Free is… a fabulously inventive record…”

Credit the incredibly talented Val Valentin with engineering that to our ears gives every indication of being a clear step up over everything else Zappa released in the ’60s.

Our last shootout was in 2007 — yes, about nine years ago. We can’t even find one clean copy of this album a year (at prices we can afford to pay of course). To be honest, one copy in our shootout was exceptionally quiet but the sound is a big step down from this one. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “The expanding contours of the music filled my room.”

More of the Music of Steely Dan

More Reviews and Commentaries for Pretzel Logic

This week’s entry is from our good friend Phil, who put a fresh twist on Pretzel Logic with his letter below, which includes the line:

“An extraordinary melange of glorious guiltars, voices, drums.”

Yeah baby!

“It was like a magic carpet ride into a dark cave filled with jewel boxes of brilliant stones. Bejewelled sound. An extraordinary melange of glorious guiltars, voices, drums. The expanding contours of the music filled my room. The best sounding rock album I’ve ever heard.”

Phil, whatever you’re smokin’, give me a hit and I’ll join you in that “dark cave filled with jewel boxes of brilliant stones”! Reminds me a lot of my listening room, except for the part about the stones. (more…)

Gentle Giant – Octopus

This minty Vertigo Spaceship label British import original pressing has SUPERB SUPER HOT Stamper sound on side one. It’s BIG, open and Tubey Magical in the best tradition of British Prog Rock. If you’re a fan of ELP, Yes, Tull, Floyd and the like, this music might just be right up your alley. And unless you have some seriously expensive pressings, not many albums by the above-named bands will be competitive sonically with the sound of this side one. The album is VERY well-recorded.

Side one was tonally correct with an extended top end, the kind of top that many British pressings only hint at. We gave side one a grade of A++. It will be very hard to beat because it sounds AMAZING. It’s British analog at its richest and tubiest.

Side two was a step down sonically. Although rich and full-bodied, there is some smear on the transients and the stage is not as big as it is on this superb side one. (more…)

Jefferson Airplane – Volunteers

More Jefferson Airplane

Reviews and Commentaries for The Jefferson Airplane

This original RCA Orange Label pressing boasts dramatically better sound than most pressings – this is a very good way to hear this notoriously problematical album. Featuring a host of stellar guest musicians, including Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, and Stephen Stills.

This will never be an audiophile Demo Disc, but the good copies sound much more “right” than most, and that is about the best one can hope for with Volunteers. We rarely do shootouts for the album because finding good sound and quiet surfaces is just too hard these days, what with every vintage pressing now being suddenly collectible according to every record store owner in Los Angeles. (more…)

Which Epic Labels for 12 Dreams Have the Best Sound?

More of the Music of Spirit

Here is some moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.

Don’t bother with the black label Epic reissues. In our experience they are consistently awful.

Yellow is the original label and orange the first reissue; both can be good.

The reviews reproduced below tell the story of the album far better than I can. If you like Pink Floyd, The Beatles (circa Revolver and Pepper), and the myriad other bands who took off in the direction of Psych Rock and Art Rock, you should find much to like here.

And if you don’t we give you your money back.

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Joe Walsh – The Best of…

More Joe Walsh 

  • An outstanding copy of Walsh’s first compilation album, with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on side one matched to a Hot Stamper side two 
  • With sound close to our Shootout Winner on side one, Turn To Stone and Rocky Mountain Way are amazing here
  • We expected to hear dubby, sub-generation tape copy sound, but instead we discovered that these tracks – on the right pressings, natch – sound pretty darn close to the ones on the albums they originally came from
  • The perfect sampler for a casual Joe Walsh fan, featuring songs from his tenure with the James Gang along with some of his best known solo tracks

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Mozart / Piano Concerto No. 27 / Backhaus / Bohm

Lovely music. Superb sound, one of the rarest of the London records. I haven’t seen one of these in close to twenty years. 

Performed with The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Karl Bohm, this record also features the Piano Sonata in A-major.

This is an Older Classical/Orchestral Review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the Sonic Grades and Vinyl Playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

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Joe Turner – Singing the Blues

  • Joe Turner’s wonderful 1967 release finally arrives on the site with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This is an exceptionally well recorded blues album by one of the greats, with the kind of big, punchy, full-bodied sound that music such as this absolutely demands
  • “Backed by some top studio players of the era (Buddy Lucas on tenor and harmonica along with a four-piece rhythm section), the 56-year old classic blues singer shows that he was still in prime form.”

For years we have been touting a select group of albums Joe Turner did for Pablo in the ’70s — Life Ain’t Easy comes to mind — but this is our first foray into his Bluesway period. Mobile Fidelity did this title on CD right at the start of the digital era. As deaf as they are (seriously; who has made more bad sounding reissues than this group of so-called audiophiles?), apparently they could still hear that the sound of the original album was so good that it justified its release to the new audience armed with CD players as opposed to turntables. And now here we are, having gone full circle, back to vintage vinyl. (more…)