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More Breakthrough Pressing Discoveries Like This One
Okay, we are not too proud to admit it. We Was Wrong about Wings at the Speed of Sound as a recording.
Yes, that kind of thing happens when you regularly play thousands and thousands of records year after year. The right pressing can show you that your understanding of a given recording was, shall we say, incomplete.
The great thing about our business is that, whenever we have new data that serves to correct a previously mistaken judgment, the result is that we are then able to offer even better sounding pressings to our customers.
That way everybody wins. We’ve never pretended to know it all, and there’s no reason to start now.
Back to Wings at the Speed of Sound. Previously we had written:
I can’t even begin to convey to you what a rough shootout this was. Copy after copy bored us to tears and most of them were too noisy. It was one of those shootouts that almost defeated us, but we persevered and managed to find a few Hot Stampers. They didn’t do miracles and turn Speed Of Sound into a stunning Demo Disc, but they sounded musical, correct and enjoyable, and that seems to be all you can ask for on this album.
This is not true. We played a copy that earned our very special grade of Four Pluses (on one side, two sides would have been too much to ask for) because it showed us an At the Speed of Sound that we had no idea could possibly exist, this after having played dozens of imports and domestic pressings over the previous twenty years or so.
It was DRAMATICALLY bigger and more transparent, with no sacrifice in richness or smoothness. Here was a Wings at the Speed of Sound we had no idea could possibly exist, simply because we had never managed to clean and play a copy with the right stampers that could show us the kind of sound that must be on the master tape.
Before we did this shootout, we had no idea how high to set the bar. Which leads us to:
This Key Takeaway
In that respect we were in exactly the same place as every record loving audiophile on the face of the Earth.
How good can the record sound? How high is up?
We discussed this all-too-common mystery [1] in a listing we wrote for an amazing sounding copy of Heart’s Little Queen album we discovered many years ago, linked here.
In our old listing, we noted: Now that we know what stampers to look for, future pressings are likely to be very, very good sounding, if everything goes the way we hope it will.
[Things did go our way, with plenty of Shootout Winning White Hot copies having been found since we made that breakthrough all the way back in 2016. The right stampers are about five times more rare than the wrong ones, but they can be found. You just have to know what to look for.]
[1] What is the synonym of mystery?
Mirriam-Webster answers:
“Some common synonyms of mystery are enigma, problem, puzzle, and riddle.
While all these words mean “something which baffles or perplexes,” mystery applies to what cannot be fully understood by reason or less strictly to whatever resists or defies explanation.”
Welcome to the mysterious world of records!
We had written about the subject many years ago under the heading: Graham Nash’s Wild Tales and Their Mysteries Many and Deep. A relevant excerpt from that commentary:
What hurts so many pressings of this album is a lifeless, compressed quality and a lack of presence.
Were the stampers a bit worn for those copies, or was it bad vinyl that couldn’t hold the energy of the stamper, or perhaps some stampers just weren’t cut right?
These are mysteries, and they are mysteries that will always be mysteries, if for no other reason than that the number of production variables hopelessly intertwined at the moment of creation can never be teased apart no matter how hard one tries.
As we never get tired of saying, thinking is really not much help with regard to finding better sounding records.
Not surprisingly, we’ve found that cleaning them and playing them seems to work the best.
Those two things work the best because nothing else works at all.