More of the Music of Cannonball Adderley
More of the Music of Frank Sinatra
One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:
Holy Moly Fellows!
I’m playing through my most recent Better Records Short Stack ™. First up, Somethin’ Else by Cannonball and Bill, followed by Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night.
Man. The sound just LEAPS out of the system. I’m not kidding, it literally JUMPS from the speakers, smooth, clean, big, bold and beautiful. Did someone play with the volume? Did I change the gain? No man! These records just sound FANTASTIC!
Thank you gentlemen. Happy New Year!
Doug
Doug,
Thanks for writing. There is a reason that on every listing we put this boilerplate in the body of the text:
What We’re Listening For on Record X
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- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would 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.
Exactly right: We want our records to have presence and energy, to be big and bold and jump out of the speakers.
This is the opposite of what everyone whose stuck in the world of Heavy Vinyl is hearing.
Most of those records are veiled, recessed and compressed.
Who on earth wants that sound? It’s beyond our understanding how it is that so many audiophiles cannot tell the difference between a good record and the mediocre-at-best product being offered today.
Thanks for your letter. Glad you liked our Hot Stamper pressings as much as we did.
TP
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