We recently had a chance to do another shootout for this album, and when you find a great copy the sound is out of this world. Not many live albums have this kind of “you are there” immediacy. Turn down the lights, crank up the volume, and you’ll be right there in the crowd as Joni and the LA Express (Tom Scott, Robben Ford, and the crew) knock out jazzy versions of some of her best material.

The brass sounds great — you can really hear the breath moving through the horns, with the all-important bite that brings their various characters to life.

I’d be remiss not to mention the amazing bottom end on this copy. The best sides have BIG, NOTE-LIKE bass that sets an unusually strong foundation for these great songs. You don’t usually get much bass on Joni’s studio albums, so Whomp-aholics like myself will find a copy like this to be quite a treat.

Just check out the songs on here:

• You Turn Me On I’m A Radio,
• Big Yellow Taxi,
• Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,
• Circle Game,
• People’s Parties,
• All I Want,
• Woodstock,
• The Last Time I Saw Richard,

and on and on. Those are many of our very favorite Joni songs, and the versions on this album do not disappoint.

What the Best Sides of Miles of Aisles 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 1974
• 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 the record is 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 a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Great Live Arrangements

Joni reworks some of her most well-known material here, giving the songs new arrangements and making them fresh again.

Both this and her other live album, Shadows and Light, can have excellent sound on the better copies, although the sound — and especially the music — is markedly different on the two albums. Miles of Aisles sounds much more like her earlier work, with the kind of analog warmth we find on the best early ’70s recordings (and practically nowhere else).

Shadows, in contrast, has a harder, more modern sound, more like Wild Things Run Fast. It’s not necessarily worse — I’m sure that’s the sound that she wanted for her music at that time. That’s just the way her albums from that period sound. I think audiophiles will prefer the sound of her first live album, but both are certainly worth owning.

This album has the LA Express as her backing band, so if you hear echoes of Court and Spark in the music it’s not hard to see why.

What We’re Listening For on Miles of Aisles

• 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 — Henry Lewy in this case — would have 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 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.