More Albums that Come Alive When You Turn Up Your Volume
Big speakers and expensive equipment might seem like the ticket, but they are not enough.
If you want to hear some smokin’ Peter Frampton power chords from the days when he was with the band, this album captures that sound better than any of their studio releases, and far better than Frampton Comes Alive on even the hottest Hot Stampers.
Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.
We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We seek them out, and we know how to play them.
Who knew? We didn’t, of course, until not that many years ago (2014 maybe?). But we are in the business of finding these things out. We get paid by our customers to find them the best sounding pressings in the world. It’s our job and we take it very seriously.
Did any audiophile reviewers ever play the album and report on its amazing sound?
Not that I know of.
Do they have the kind of playback systems — the big rooms, the big speakers, the speed, the energy, the power — that are required to get the most from a recording such as this?
Doubtful. Unlikely in the extreme even.
They don’t know how good a record like this can sound because they aren’t able to play it the way it needs to be played.
To play this record right, you should have, at a minimum:
- Big dynamic speakers, and they should be pulled well out into the room to create a three-dimensional presentation, in this case of a live rock concert. If they are too big for the room, and stuck in the corners, you haven’t got a chance with a recording like this. (Ahem.)
- A large room — our new studio has a 12 foot ceiling, a big advantage when playing recordings such as this.
- Strong walls with no windows, and a concrete floor to keep the bass from leaving the room (if at all possible).
- Seating for a single listener far from any boundary, especially the back wall (a common problem with small-ish rooms).
- Extensive room treatments to deal with the loud levels required by this music.
- Enough power to move all the air in the listening room with authority.
- And, finally, high quality electricity, a heavily tweaked front end and all the rest of the audio stuff we discuss so often on this blog.
Without all of these things, it’s hard for us to imagine any audiophile record reviewer being able to hear this record sound the way the artists and engineers wanted it to. Playing a record like this in a small room and moderate levels practically guarantees that the listener will not be able to hear what makes the best copies of this album so special.
Our system evolved over the decades to play these kinds of records, primarily for two reasons:
- We love music and want to hear our favorite recordings sound their best, and
- With this much money on the line, to stay in business we have to be right about the superior sound of the vintage Hot Stamper pressings we offer
Old Times, Good Times
And when was the last time you read about a record that hadn’t just been reissued on Heavy Vinyl?
There was a time when audiophile reviewers wrote about exceptionally good sounding vintage pressings, amazing recordings they’d stumbled across while wandering through the world of vinyl.
We’ve discovered our share and then some.
Harry Pearson comes immediately to mind, but there were many others back in those day following his lead. Now it seems few if any can be bothered. These days the money is in Heavy Vinyl. That’s what gets the clicks and the ad dollars.
Neither of which have anything to do with better records. Better records are physical objects that live or die by the quality of their sound.
They are not advice or opinions or theories or recommendations or categories.
They are records you can play in your home to prove — to yourself and anyone else with an open mind and open ears — that vintage pressings are vastly superior to modern ones, once you’ve figured out how to clean and find them.
Eddie Kramer, King of the Rockers
What Eddie Kramer did for Led Zeppelin II, he’s done for Humble Pie on this album, and that’s saying a lot. If Zep II is the hardest rocking studio album in the history of the world, Rockin’ The Fillmore is its close companion, the hardest rockin’ live album in the history of the world.
This is VERY hard rock, recorded, mixed (by Peter Frampton) and mastered (by Robert Ludwig) to be played good and loud. If you have the system for it, this record can sound like you wheeled a stack of Marshall amps into your listening room and cranked them up to 10.
If you like the raw, distorted guitar sound that was captured so well on Free’s albums, you are going to love Frampton’s guitar tone here. (I saw him in concert about twenty years ago and he played a set like this one — all hard rockin’, all of the time, and very, very loud. By all accounts he deeply loves that kind of music, even though for the most part he gave up recording it a long time ago.)
Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.
It’s the kind of recording that has caused me to pursue big stereo systems driving big dynamic speakers for as long as I can remember. You need drivers with a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.
For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.
Further Reading