More Records with Exceptionally Tubey Magical Sound
Reviews of Tubey Magical Demonstration Quality Discs
You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic that exist on Tumbleweed Connection. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Elton John’s Masterpiece, Tumbleweed Connection
Ranked strictly in terms of Tubey Magic, I would have to put Tumbleweed Connection on our list of Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time, right up there with, in alphabetical order (limited to one album per artist or band):
- The Beatles / Sgt. Peppers (1967)
- David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust (1972)
- Dire Straits / Self-Titled (1977, and clearly the outlier in this group)
- The Doors / Self-Titled (1967)
- The Eagles / Self-Titled (1972)
- Pink Floyd / Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
- Cat Stevens / Tea for the Tillerman (1970)
- Ten Years After / A Space in Time (1970)
- The Who / Tommy (1969)
This has to be one of the best sounding rock records of all time — certainly worthy of a Top Ten spot on our Top 100 list. Engineered by Robin Geoffrey Cable at Trident, there is no other Elton John recording that is as rich, big and powerfully dynamic as Tumbleweed Connection.
Many of the albums you see here played an important role in helping me improve my stereo [1], some of them starting as far back as the mid-’70s.
By the 2000s, we had a heavily-treated, dedicated room, and later still a custom built studio. The challenges posed by these recordings were instrumental in helping us make improvements to the quality of the playback in both.
The better the stereo got, the more these records showed us just how amazing the right pressings — we call them Hot Stampers — could sound.
I have been playing some of these albums for more than fifty years. They are responsible for helping me learn much of what I know about records and equipment.
[1] Here are some links to other records that were instrumental in helping make me a more critical listener and motivated me to improve the quality of my stereo, room, setup, electricity and all the rest.
Were it not for my desire (obsession may be the better word) to get the wonderful music on these albums to sound better with each passing year, there would be no Hot Stampers. Hot Stampers are hard to find. No one would go to all that trouble for music that was not overwhelmingly powerful and all but irresistible. If you have records you can’t wait to play every time you do something to improve your stereo, you know what I am talking about.
The albums listed here not only informed my taste in music, but helped guide the progress of the stereo equipment I use to play that music on. I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for close to five decades, precisely in order to play demanding recordings such as these, the music I fell in love with as a budding audiophile in my twenties (and sometimes even earlier, as in the case of The Beatles).
There is no question that the artists that recorded these albums, in concert with their remarkably talented producers and engineers, sweated every detail of these exceptional recordings. Year after year, we have done everything we could think of to get these recordings to sound their best. We know how good they can sound on systems that have what it takes to play them.
The more tweaking and tuning you do — on your system, room and electricity — the more progress you will make in this hobby, and the bigger and bolder these recordings will come to sound. They are the most difficult-to-reproduce albums we know of, the ones that can help you make real, demonstrable progress in this hobby.
Again and again it was meeting the challenge of reproducing recordings such as these that allowed us to get to the next level, and they can do the same for you.
Further Reading