More of the Music of The Pretenders
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Pretenders
An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile LP reviewed and found wanting.
This pressing is completely lifeless. The brain trust at Nautilus managed to take all the rock out of this rock and roll band.
It’s yet another ridiculous joke played on a far-too-credulous audiophile public. If this Nautilus LP isn’t the perfect example of a Pass/Not-Yet record, I can’t imagine what would be.
But look who’s talking? I bought plenty of Nautilus pressings in the ’70s and ’80s, some good ones, some not so good. And some of them I still liked well into the 2000s. What’s my excuse?
Even as recently as, say, fifteen years ago, I still had yet to achieve much of the progress in audio I would need to achieve in order to get past the last of the audiophile pressings I still clung to.
And there’s still one that just cannot be beat, even now.
Keep in mind I had been heavily into audiophile equipment and high quality records for thirty years at that point.
Which is simply more proof that audio is hard [1] and that your progress in audio is most likely going to be slow, the way mine was.
We Have a Section for These Kinds of Records
This record clearly belongs in a section I call Stone Age Audio Records, comprising the kinds of records that sounded good on modest stereos in the Seventies and Eighties, the ones with loudness controls and speakers sitting on milk crates.
On today’s modern, dramatically more revealing equipment, these records show themselves to be a ghost of the real thing, with practically no connection to anything resembling fidelity to the recording.
If your stereo is bad enough to make playback of these records tolerable, you are definitely in need of help. This blog is here to show you a better way.
[1] Audio is a lot harder than I thought because I didn’t know enough to know even that much.
[2] We crossed the Rubicon in 2007, and there is not a chance in the world we will be going back.
Further Reading