More Frank Sinatra
- Come Dance With Me! returns to the site for only the second time in three years, here with superb Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this early Capitol stereo LP
- This pressing was doing pretty much everything we wanted it to — and on both sides — with an abundance of energy and the kind of immediacy that can put Frank Sinatra front and center right in your very own listening room
- One of the more fun Sinatra albums we’ve had the pleasure of playing recently, and this is a copy that delivers big time
- It also plays about as quiet as we can find them, and finding one without marks that play is practically a miracle
- 5 stars: “Working with Billy May again, Frank Sinatra recorded his hardest swing album ever with Come Dance with Me! . . . an intoxicating rush of invigorating dance songs.”
Get ready to swing with the Chairman of the Board on this superb pressing of his classic album from 1959! Billy May and his orchestra back Frank with wonderful arrangements here, and a copy like this lets you appreciate everyone’s hard work. On the better pressings, the brass blasts on side two are to die for!
It’s tough to find good-sounding copies of almost any Sinatra album, finding amazing copies of his most classic albums like this one is a ridiculously tough task. Even for us, the guys who do nothing but search for and audition records all day every day! So we were thrilled to play a copy like this one that did just what we wanted from music like this.
If you never thought you’d hear a Sinatra record sound as powerful as the man himself came across — this is the pressing that you’ve been looking for. Most copies were either smeary or edgy, but this one was wonderfully smooth with impressive clarity.
Sinatra fans, don’t miss out — we don’t find records like this too often.
What The Best Sides Of Come Dance With Me! Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1959
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
The Key to The Best Sound
This vintage Capitol stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely begin to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.
Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, Tubey Magical sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.).
Hot Stamper sound is rarely about the details of a given recording. In the case of this album, more than anything else a Hot Stamper must succeed at recreating a solid, palpable, real Sinatra singing live in your listening room. The better copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but less than one out of 100 new records do, if our experience with the hundreds we’ve played over the years can serve as a guide.
What We’re Listening For On Come Dance With Me!
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight note-like bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
Come Dance With Me
Something’s Gotta Give
Just in Time
Dancing in the Dark
Too Close for Comfort
I Could Have Danced All Night
Side Two
Saturday Night
Day in Day Out
Cheek to Cheek
Baubles, Bangles and Beads
The Song Is You
The Last Dance
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
Working with Billy May again, Frank Sinatra recorded his hardest swing album ever with Come Dance with Me!
Driven by an intensely swinging horn section, the album has a fair share of slower numbers, but the songs that make the biggest impression are the up-tempo cuts. With May’s charts wildly careening all over the place, Sinatra relies on his macho swagger; as a result, Come Dance with Me! is an intoxicating rush of invigorating dance songs.