Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums with Huge Choruses Available Now
The multi-tracked layers of guitars really come to life on the better copies. The not-so-great pressings tend to be congested and compressed, thickening the sound and diffusing the layers of multi-tracked harmonies. Tom Scholz’s uniquely overdriven, distorted leads have near-perfect timbre. On the top copies you can really hear how much power that sound adds to the music.
As is the case for the better pressings of Aqualung,just to take one example, when the guitar sounds this good, it really makes you sit up and take notice of the guy’s playing. When the sound works the music works, our seven word definition of a Hot Stamper.
Our killer copies have sweetness and tubey warmth we didn’t expect to hear. Better yet, the best copies have jump-out-of-the-speakers presence without being aggressive, no mean feat.
The good ones make you want to turn up the volume; the louder they get the better they sound. Try that with the average copy. When playing mass-market pop-rock music like this, more level usually means only one thing: bloody eardrums.
The typical Boston EQ is radio-friendly, not audiophile-friendly. But some were cut right, with the kind of richness, sweetness and smoothness that we fondly refer to here at Better Records as the sound of analog.
Choruses Are Key
The production techniques used on the late Brad Delp’s powerful vocals had to be implemented with the utmost skill and care or they would never have made the album the smash success that it is. His vocals are one of the great strengths of the album. You can be sure the producers and engineers knew that they had a very special singer in Brad and lavished their time and energy on getting his voice just right in the mix, making use of plenty of roomy analog reverb around both his multi-tracked leads and the background harmonies as well.
After hearing plenty of copies, one thing became clear — if the vocals don’t have good presence and breathy texture, you might as well be listening to the radio. Toss it onto the trade-in pile and move on. Brad really belts out those high notes; the right blend of clarity and weight is what lets his soaring vocals work their chart-topping magic.
The richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality is most apparent on Boston where you most always hear it on a pop record: in the biggest, loudest, densest, most climactic choruses.
We set the playback volume so that the loudest parts of the record are as huge and powerful as they can possibly grow to be without crossing the line into distortion or congestion. On some records, Dark Side of the Moon comes instantly to mind, the guitar solos on Money are the loudest thing on the record. On Breakfast in America the sax toward the end of The Logical Song is the biggest and loudest sound on the record, louder even than Roger Hodgson’s near-hysterical multi-tracked screaming “Who I am” about three quarters of the way through. Those, however, are clearly exceptions to the rule. Most of the time it’s the final chorus that gets bigger and louder than anything else.
Blasting the Wall of Sound
A pop song is usually structured so as to build more and more strength as it works its way through its verses and choruses, past the bridge, coming back around to make one final push, releasing all its energy in the final chorus, the climax of the song. On a good recording — one with real dynamics — that part should be very loud and very powerful.
It’s almost always the toughest test for a pop record, and it’s the main reason we play our records loud. The copies that hold up through the final choruses of their album’s largest scaled productions are the ones that provide the biggest thrills and the most emotionally powerful musical experiences one can have. Our Top 100 is full of the kinds of records that reward that listening at loud levels.
We live for that sound here at Better Records. It’s what vintage analog pressings do so brilliantly. They do it so much better than any other medium that there is really no comparison and certainly no substitute. If you’re on this site you probably already know that.
Further Reading
A friend alerted me recently to this Tom Scholz interview from a couple of years ago where he talks about his involvement with the different pressings and, having possession of the master tape, made EQ and level changes and even tape cuts in the master which found their way onto successive pressings. He claims “even a careful listener couldn’t have told where it was or what I did”, maybe back in its day but I wonder about that now. The relevant discussion goes for about 10 minutes from the 11’30 mark. https://youtu.be/h7-w0s2IX3s
Best, Austin
Austin,
Thanks for sending me this. I very much enjoyed hearing Scholz talk about his approach to engineering the first album. The best part for us old school analog guys is hearing him mercilessly bash the compact disc. There is a huge amount of Tubey Magical artificial processing on the album, and I would hope it would be clear by now to most everyone who loves music and wants to hear it properly that digital is not the right format to hear what Scholz did to those tracks to make them sound the way they do.
He clearly sweated the details, so much so that when the details are lost or disfigured, he actually cares enough to want to do something about it.
The versions of the album that sound best to us are the early pressings. Whatever he did later to the tapes or in subsequent masterings I will leave for others to judge.
Best, TP