More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel
Reviews and Commentaries for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
More superb sound from the legendary CBS 30th street studios in New York!
This album checks off some big boxes for us here at Better Records.
- It’s a Top 100 album
- It’s a Demo Disc for Tubey Magic
- It’s a must own album from 1966
- It’s the duo’s best sounding record
- And it has especially Tubey Magical guitars
- It’s part of the core collection of well recorded rock & pop albums
Turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and you’ll have one of the best — if not THE best — folk duos of all time performing right there in your listening room for you. The sound is open, spacious, and transparent with breathy vocals and unusually low levels of spit. The strings are more dynamic than we’re used to hearing and the bottom end has really nice weight to it.
These old Simon & Garfunkel records weren’t often owned by audiophiles who kept their records in pristine condition.
No, these were the popular records of their day, purchased by the record-buying public, and they were played and played hard, typically on cheap equipment. There are many quiet passages on this album that are going to reveal whatever surface issues might exist, so a copy that plays Mint Minus Minus is about as good as you can hope for.
Since only the right vintage 360 pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell.
Audio in the 70s
In my formative years in the hobby, most of the audiophiles I ran into were primarily classical guys. Some played jazz and vocal records, but nobody really put much time and money into their stereo so they could hear radio-friendly pop songs reproduced in higher fidelity.
That was my experience when I first got into audio in the early 70s. It was taken for granted that good equipment existed to play orchestral music, jazz, vocals and not much else.
We Can Help
Below you will find some moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win shootouts.
Stick to stereo. The mono pressings we’ve played over the last ten years ranged from passable to awful. We stopped buying them a long time ago. We know of no Simon and Garfunkel albums that sound better in mono than they do in stereo.
As of 2023, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme sounds best to us this way:
The Legendary CBS Studios
CBS 30th Street Studio, also known as Columbia 30th Street Studio, and nicknamed “The Church”, was an American recording studio operated by Columbia Records from 1949 to 1981 located at 207 East 30th Street, between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan, New York City.
It was considered by some in the music industry to be the best sounding room in its time and others consider it to have been the greatest recording studio in history. A large number of recordings were made there in all genres, including Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959), Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (Original Broadway Cast recording, 1957), and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979).
Recording studio
Having been a church for many years, it had been abandoned and empty for sometime, and in 1949 it was transformed into a recording studio by Columbia Records.
“There was one big room, and no other place in which to record”, wrote John Marks in an article in Stereophile magazine in 2002.
The recording studio had 100 foot high ceilings, a 100 foot floorspace for the recording area, and the control room was on the second floor being only 8 by 14 feet. Later, the control room was moved down to the ground floor.
“It was huge and the room sound was incredible,” recalls Jim Reeves, a sound technician who had worked in it. “I was inspired,” he continues “by the fact that, aside from the artistry, how clean the audio system was.”
Wikipedia
Further Reading
- New to the Blog? Start here
- More Columbia 30th street studio recordings
- Reviews of recordings made at Columbia’s 30th street studio
- How to get the most out of your records – a step by step guide
