More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel
Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water
Sonic Grade: C
What’s an easy way to recognize the better pressings?
They’re the ones with textured strings in the orchestral arrangements.
The string tone on the average copy is hard and steely.
The Classic 200 gram pressing suffers from a case of steely strings. When the strings are blasting away at the end of the title song, you want to be able to hear the texture without the strings sounding shrill and edgy.
This is no mean feat, for the record or the stereo.
Here are some of the other records we’ve discovered are good for testing string tone and texture.
Cecilia can only rock when the bass is full and deep; we call it whomp. (Those with equipment and/or rooms that can’t play bass properly call it slop.) The best copies give you the low-end foundation you need to make that song come to life.
And last but far from least, Simon and Garfunkel records live and die by the quality of their vocal reproduction. Transparent, breathy, sweet, warm, rich, tonally-neutral — these are the comments posted on our notes for track after track on the Hot Stamper copies.
No heavy vinyl reissue or later pressing is going to give you what the real Hot Stamper 360 Label pressings can in this area.
As a general rule, Bridge Over Troubled Water, like most Heavy Vinyl pressings, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to have more compression.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to have more smear.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
In just four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.
Below you will find our reviews and commentaries for the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years.
We confess that even as recently as the early 2000s we were still impressed with the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles are impressed by these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.
Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers see — and hear — things the same way.