Simon and Garfunkel – The Right 360 Stereo Pressing Is King

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More Moderately Helpful Title Specific Advice

We played a big stack of copies a while back and ran into all kinds of problems.

Some were dull, some were spitty, many were smeared, and far too many were gritty.

The later pressings didn’t solve any of these problems.

In fact, none of the Red Label copies we’ve ever played sounded good enough on either side to merit a Hot Stamper grade. If you want good sound for this album, 360 stereo pressings seem to be the only way to go. The mono pressings we played were painfully bad.

Stick with stereo on this album. The Mono pressings — at least the ones we’ve played — aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time).

TRACK LISTING

Side One

You Can Tell the World 
Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream 
Bleecker Street 
Sparrow 
Benedictus 
The Sound of Silence

Side Two

He Was My Brother 
Peggy-O 
Go Tell It on the Mountain 
The Sun Is Burning 
The Times They Are A-Changin’ 
Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.

AMG Review

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM doesn’t resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album, because the Simon & Garfunkel sound here was different from that of the chart-topping duo that emerged a year later.

Their first record together since their days as the teen duo of Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964 and, in keeping with their own sincere interests at the time, it was a folk-revival album. Paul Simon was just spreading his wings as a serious songwriter and shares space with other composers as well as a pair of traditional songs, including a beautifully harmonized rendition of Peggy-O.


This record sounds best this way:

Mono or Stereo? Stereo! 

On the Right Domestic Pressing 

On the Right Early Pressing

Which simply means that the 360 label domestic stereo pressings win our shootouts, in this case without exception.