More of the Music of Badfinger
Reviews and Commentaries for Badfinger
British band, British pressing… right?
Nope. It’s just another record misunderstanding.
We had an original British pressing in our shootout, unbeknownst to me as it was playing of course. And guess where it finished: dead last. The most thick, congested, crude, distorted, compressed sound of ALL the copies we played. We love the work of Porky, Pecko, et al. in general, but once again this is a case where a British Band recorded in England sounds best on domestic vinyl. (McCartney’s first album on Apple is the same way.)
Just saw this today (11/29/2021)
Like many record collectors, he is happy to have a mediocre-at-best, dubby-sounding original pressing, poorly mastered by a famous mastering engineer, George Peckham, a man we know from extensive experience to be responsible for cutting some of the best sounding records we’ve ever played. He is one of the greats.
Is Dodgerman an audiophile? He could be! Many audiophiles employ this kind of mistaken audiophile thinking, believing that a British band’s albums must sound their best on British vinyl for some reason, possibly a cosmic one.
Those of us who actually play lots of records and listen to them critically know that that is simply not true and never has been.
How did we come by that information?
By conducting carefully controlled experiments to find out.
We don’t guess. We don’t assume.
We just play lots and lots of records and find out which ones sound better and which ones sound worse.
To be fair, we have played exactly one copy of the album with Porky/Pecko stampers. Did we get a bad one and the gentleman quoted above got a good one? Nobody knows, because nobody can know with a great deal more evidence to make the case one way or the other. Would we buy another Porky pressing? If we found one for cheap, sure. But that is not very likely to happen. Those kinds of records are not cheap these days.
If you have a great sounding UK copy, we would love to hear it. Until then we remain skeptical.
Not close minded to the possibility of course, that would be foolish.
But not in any hurry to throw good money after bad in the hopes that Dodgerman actually knows much, or cares in the least, about sound quality.
Assuming that Dodgerman does care about sound quality, he is engaging in another kind of magical thinking by assuming that the original is going to be the best sounding pressing of the album.
A public service from your friends at Better Records.
Want to find your own top quality copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
Straight Up should sound best this way:
Further Reading
On November 18, 2019, a fellow on Discogs who goes by the name of Dodgerman had this to say referencing the original UK pressing of Straight Up, SAPCOR 19:
So Happy, to have a first UK press, of this lost gem. Porky/Pecko