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I have two personal favorites among his many excellent recordings:
Both are Must Own records in my book. Masterpieces. Desert Island Discs.
In my opinion, both are records that should be more popular with audiophiles. For some reason they are not. If you have not heard one or both of these classics, check them out. They are the very definition of the kind of Big Production Rock I have been listening to since I first fell in love with them back in the early Seventies. That was about fifty years ago and I still play both of them regularly for enjoyment. I have never tired of the music on either of them in all that time and I don’t think I ever will.
I’m sure you have plenty of records you feel the same way about in your collection. These are two of mine.
These are the very definition of Big Speaker albums. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to have most audiophile systems begging for mercy.
This is The Audio Challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of SONIC FIREPOWER, don’t expect to hear them the way Chris Kimsey wanted you to. Both album want to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at.
Ten Years After and Peter Frampton are two of the most influential and important artists/bands in my growth as a music lover and audiophile, joining the ranks of Roxy Music, Ambrosia, 10cc, Steely Dan, Yes, Bowie and countless others, musicians and bands who seemed to me dedicated to exploring and exploding the conventions of popular music.
My ’70s stereo needed to be a lot better than it was when I started in order to accurately reproduce the scores of challenging recordings issued by these groups in the ’70s.
You could say that the albums of all of these artists informed not only my taste in music but the actual stereo I play that music on, this one.
A number of Chris Kimsey’s recordings challenged me to up my audiophile game in order to reproduce them better. The effort was clearly worth it, because without great albums like Wind of Change and A Space in Time, can I really say I would have devoted so much time, effort and money to this hobby? Would Hot Stampers exist as a business if I wasn’t obsessed with listening to the amazing recordings the ’70s produced by the score?
Probably not, and for one simple reason. Sound doesn’t do the driving. Music does.
I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for the last four decades, precisely in order to play recordings such as these, albums with music I fell in love with back in the ’70s.
Here he is holding up a copy of Emotional Rescue, not one of his better efforts. And not one of his better photos, but this is the guy that engineered many of the truly wonderful sounding albums that I have been playing for practically fifty years. I can’t thank him enough.