Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Ambrosia
When you sit down to play ten or twelve copies of an album, one right after the other, patterns in the sound are going to emerge from that experience, patterns which would be very likely to pass unnoticed when playing one copy against another or two over the course of the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to do it.
In the case of this album, the pattern we perceived was simply this: About one or two out of that dozen or so will have punchy, solid, rich, deep bass. (There is a huge amount of bass on the recording so recognizing those special copies is not the least bit difficult if you have a full-range speaker and a properly treated room.)
About one or two copies really get the top end right, which is easily heard when the cymbals splash dynamically, with their harmonics intact, and they extend high about the rest of the soundfield (just the way they do in live music).
Fewer copies have an extended top end compared to those with tight punchy bass by the way.
Like so many Mastering Lab tube-mastered records from the era, most copies tend to be somewhat smooth.
Only one copy had both the best bass and the best highs. All the other copies fell short in one or both of these areas.
Think about it: if you do your home shootouts with three or four or even five copies of an album, what are the chances that:
1. You will detect this pattern? Or,
2. That you will run into the one copy that does it all?
This is precisely the reason we have taken the concept of doing comparisons between pressings to an entirely new level.
It’s the only way to find the outliers in the group, the “thin tails” as the statisticians like to call them. (More on outliers here.)
These very special White Hot Stamper pressings are the kind of game-changers that more than make up for all the hassle and expense of seriously good analog.
They can take your stereo, and your listening experience, to a place no other records can.
FURTHER READING