More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt
Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Linda Ronstadt
Transistory and veiled. Not worth the Capitol vinyl it was pressed on. Not the least bit enjoyable on today’s much more revealing high quality equipment.
The only stereo that can play a record that sounds the way this album does is a stereo that is powered by a pair of vintage tube amps like the Macs seen below, or something like them. (Some modern amps try to recreate that sound, and if you want to hear what is on your records, you had best avoid them.)
The above approach to record playback is also very good at hiding the faults of the Modern Heavy Vinyl record.
Remastering Out The Good Stuff
What is lost in the newly remastered recordings so popular with the record buying public these days?
Lots of things, but the most obvious and irritating is the loss of transparency.
Modern records tend to be small, veiled and recessed, and they rarely image well. But the most important quality they lack is transparency. Almost without exception they are opaque. They resist our efforts to hear into the music and get lost in it.
We don’t like that sound, and we like it less with each passing day, although we certainly used to put up with it back when we were selling what we considered to be the better Heavy Vinyl pressings from the likes of DCC, Speakers Corner, Cisco and even some Classic Records.
Now when we play the vinyl those companies produced they either bore us to tears or frustrate us with their veiled, vague, lifeless, ambience-challenged presentation.
It was sometime in 2007 when we turned a corner. The remastered Blue on Rhino Heavy Vinyl came out and was such a mediocrity that we asked ourselves “Why are we bothering?” That was all she wrote.
We stopped selling those third-rate remasters and dedicated ourselves to finding, cleaning, playing and critically evaluating vintage pressings, regardless of era or genre of music.
The result is a website full of great sounding records that should find special appeal with audiophiles who set high standards, who own good equipment and who have well-developed critical listening skills.
We play mediocre-to-bad sounding pressings so that you don’t have to, a public service from your record-loving friends at Better Records.
You can find this one in our Hall of Shame, along with others that — in our opinion — are best avoided by audiophiles looking for hi-fidelity sound. Some of these records may have passable sonics, but we found the music less than compelling. These are also records you can safely avoid.
We also have an Audiophile Record Hall of Shame for records that were marketed to audiophiles for their putatively superior sound. If you’ve spent any time on this blog at all, you know that these records are some of the worst sounding pressings we have ever had the displeasure to play.
We routinely play them in our Hot Stamper Shootouts against the vintage records that we offer, and are often surprised at just how bad an “audiophile record” can sound and still be considered an “audiophile record.”
Further Reading