More Frank Sinatra

• A wonderful 2-pack of original MONO Capitol pressings with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side one of the first disc and Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on side two of the second disc – just shy of our Shootout Winner
• Here are just a few of the things we have to say about this stunning Triple Plus side one of disc one in our notes: “very detailed”…”big, rich bass” …”lush and rich strings and vox”…”more dynamic and present”
• Rich, sweet, and completely free of phony EQ, this record will put a living, breathing Sinatra right there in your listening room
• Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
• 4 stars: “…one of Frank Sinatra’s most gentle and intimate albums… has a delicate, lovely quality…”

Superb Sinatra sound! His voice here is perfection.

These 50s LPs have the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern pressings cannot 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.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Frank 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 older recordings (this one is now close to 70 years old), 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 can serve as a guide.

You will rarely see an early Capitol or Columbia Sinatra record on our site. They are becoming more and more difficult to find in audiophile playing condition, not to mention the fact that many of the copies we take the time to audition don’t sound especially good to us in the first place.

What The Best Sides Of Close To You 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 1957
• 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 these records 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

What We’re Listening For On Close To You

• 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.

Our Famous 2-packs

Our 2-pack sets combine two copies of the same album, with at least a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade on the better of each “good” side, which simply means you have before you a pair of records that offers superb sound for the entire album.

Audiophiles are often surprised when they hear that an LP can sound amazing on one side and mediocre on the other, but since each side is pressed from different metalwork which has been aligned independently, and perhaps even cut by different mastering engineers from tapes of wildly differently quality, in our experience it happens all the time. In fact it’s much more common for a record to earn different sonic grades for its two sides than it is to rate the same grade. That’s just the way it goes in analog, where there’s no way to know how a any given side of a record sounds until you play it, and, more importantly, in the world of sound everything is relative.

Since each of the copies in the 2-pack will have one good side and one noticeably weaker or at best more run-of-the-mill side, you’ll be able to compare them on your own to hear just what it is that the Hot Stamper sides give you. This has the added benefit of helping you to improve your critical listening skills. We’ll clearly mark which copy is Hot for each side, so if you don’t want to bother with the other sides you certainly won’t have to.

Side One

Close To You
P.S. I Love You
Love Locked Out
Everything Happens To Me
It’s Easy To Remember
Don’t Like Goodbyes

Side Two

With Every Breath I Take
Blame It On My Youth
It Could Happen To You
I’ve Had My Moments
I Couldn’t Sleep A Wink Last Night
The End Of A Love Affair

AMG 4 Star Review

Close to You is one of Frank Sinatra’s most gentle and intimate albums, and that is due in no small part to the Hollywood String Quartet, which forms the core of the album’s instrumental support.

It also was one of the most difficult to record, taking eight months and five different sessions. Certainly, it is one of the most unusual and special of Sinatra’s albums, featuring a subdued and detailed performances that accentuate both the romantic longing and understated humor of the numbers, which are mainly torch songs.

With the quartet’s support, the album comes closer to sounding like a classical album, like a pop variation on chamber music. Where the intimacy of In the Wee Small Hours sounded confessional and heart-broken, Close to You has a delicate, lovely quality; it may not be seductive, but it is charming and romantic.