More Joni Mitchell

• You’ll find superb Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on all FOUR sides of these original Asylum pressings
• Sides two, three, and four are close to the BEST we have ever heard, earning stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
• Rich, full-bodied, yet open and clear – this is what vintage analog is all about, that smooth sound that never calls attention to itself and just lets the music flow
• Mastered by Bernie Grundman back when he was still cutting some of the best records around
• Joni Mitchell meets Weather Report is the best way to describe much of the vibe here

These vintage Ayslum pressings have 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, these are the records 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 The Best Sides Of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter 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 1977
• 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 these record are 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 pressings that sound as good as this two do.

Best Practices

Recently we did one of our regular shootouts for Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, using pressings we know from experience to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them as carefully as we always do. Then we unplugged everything in the house we could get away with, carefully warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next couple of hours playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process could not be more simple. The first step is to go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can’t find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

What We’re Listening For On Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

• 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.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

Overture — Cotton Avenue
Talk to Me
Jericho

Side Two

Paprika Plains

Side Three

Otis and Marlena
The Tenth World
Dreamland

Side Four

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
Off Night Backstreet
The Silky Veils of Ardor

Background

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is a 1977 double album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. It is unusual for its experimental style, expanding even further on the jazz fusion sound of Mitchell’s Hejira from the year before. Mitchell has stated that, close to completing her contract with Asylum Records, she allowed this album to be looser than anything she’d done previously.

Much of the album is experimental, but especially so are: “Overture,” played with six simultaneous guitars, some in different tunings from others, with vocal echo effects; “The Tenth World,” an extended-length instrumental of Latin percussion; and “Dreamland,” which features only percussion and voices (including Chaka Khan).

Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter attracted contributions from prominent jazz musicians, including four members of Weather Report- Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Manolo Badrena, and Alex Acuña, who would later become frequent collaborators of Mitchell’s.