Reviews and Commentaries for Tommy
We think Tommy has the best Who sound.
I don’t know of another Who album with such consistently good sound — song to song, not copy to copy, of course. Just about every song on here can sound wonderful on the right pressing. If you’re lucky enough to get a Hot Stamper copy, you’re going to be blown away by the Tubey Magical Guitars, the rock-solid bottom end, the jumpin’-out-of-the-speakers presence and dynamics, and the silky vocals and top end.
Usually the best we can give you for The Who is Big and Rockin’ (Who’s Next, Live at Leeds), but on Tommy, we can give you ’60s analog magic like you will rarely find in the decades to follow.
- These in-stock titles have exceptionally Tubey Magical Sound
- These are our most Tubey Magical Demo Discs
Killer Acoustic Guitars
Acoustic guitar reproduction is key to this recording, and on the best copies the harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard in every strum.
- These in-stock titles have exceptionally Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars
- These are Demo Discs for Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitars
What do high grades give you for this album? Silky, sweet vocals; huge weight to the bottom end; “you are there” immediacy; BIG drums, off the charts rock and roll energy, and shocking clarity and transparency.
No other Who album has all these things in such abundance.
The Tubey Magic Top Ten
You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amount of Tubey Magic that exists on this recording. 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 Tommy.
Ranked strictly in terms of Tubey Magic, Tommy certainly deserves a place on our list of The Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time. Here is the complete list, 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)
- Elton John / Tumbleweed Connection
- 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)
The Most Tubey Magical CD Ever
As hard as it may be for me to say anything nice about the folks at Mobile Fidelity, the CD you see pictured to your left is one of the best sounding CDs I have ever heard.
It actually has more Tubey Magic than the average British Track pressing, and certainly more than any British Polydor, Decca, or MCA LP, or any import from any country other than England for that matter.
It blows my mind every time I play it.
This amazingly good sounding title cut by Steve Hoffman is right up there with it for surprisingly analog quality sound.
Now some of you are going to have a hard time wrapping your heads around this next bit, but no two CDs sound the same, just as no two records sound the same. Get together five identical copies of a CD and shoot them out yourself. At least one or two of them will sound better than the others. I have done this experiment dozens of times and the results are beyond question. You can always blindfold yourself and check your findings if you have any doubts.
The Best of the Sixties and Seventies
This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the ’60s and ’70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to the effort expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, Yes, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and too many others to list.
It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.
Big Production Tubey Magical British Rock just doesn’t get much better than Tommy.