A Member of the Prestigious “None Rocks Harder” Club
More Reviews and Commentaries for 801 Live
The best Island copies of this album ROCK HARDER than practically any record we’ve ever played. If you have the system for it, this one will bring a Live Art Rock concert right into your living room!
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 right at the top of the list of my Favorite Albums — a Desert Island Disc if ever there was one. I stumbled across it more thirty years ago and I’ve loved it ever since. It all started when a college buddy played me the wildly original Tomorrow Never Knows from the album and asked me to name the tune. Eno’s take is so different from The Beatles version that I confess it took me an embarrassingly long while to catch on.
- This link will take you to the Hot Stamper pressings of our Hardest Rockin’ albums currently available.
- Here are the titles that have earned a place on our None Rocks Harder List.
Adventures in Music and Sound
Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno were founding members of Roxy Music.
AMG calls Roxy Music the “most adventurous rock band of the early ’70s” and I’m inclined to agree with them.
Roxy are certainly one of the most influential and important bands in my growth as a music lover and audiophile, joining the ranks of 10cc, Steely Dan, Yes, James Taylor, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, America, Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp, Eno, Talking Heads, The Doors, Jethro Tull, Elton John, The Beatles, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Little Feat, Traffic, Nilsson, Elvis Costello, Sergio Mendes, Neil Young, The Eagles, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, The Cars, Peter Frampton, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and countless others.
These musicians and bands were clearly dedicated to making high quality recordings, recordings that could only come fully to life in the homes of those with the most advanced audio equipment.
My system was forced to evolve in order to reproduce the scores of challenging recordings issued by these groups in the ’60s and ’70s.
The love you have for your favorite music has to be the strongest driving force if you actually want to be successful in this hobby at the highest levels.
Some of the records that helped me advance in audio can be found here.
This record sounds best to us this way:
For more moderately helpful title-specific advice, click here.
This is a true Demo Disc in all the areas of sound reproduction listed below. Other records with these qualities can be seen by clicking on any of these links.