More Music Produced or Performed by Al Kooper
Most copies have bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals.
The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, this album pretty much falls apart.
Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud. At higher volumes the distortion and grit are just too much.
On the better copies, the one with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.
Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange, you are doing better than expected.
We’re Big Fans
Super Session is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:
- It’s a personal favorite
- It’s a must own rock album from 1968
- It’s a Demo Disc for big speakers that play at loud levels
- It’s part of the core collection of well recorded rock & pop albums
360 Vs. Red Label
Can the Red Label reissues sound any good?
Why yes, they can, and here’s why. Every once in a while, when it comes time to stamp out some more copies of slow but still-selling records, “back catalog” as they are known in the trade, someone has to go into the vault and find a tape with which to master. Maybe that person finds a real master tape. Or maybe that person finds a master tape and makes a really high quality dub of it to master from. Either one of those possibilities might produce a great sounding final product relative to the sub-generation, EQ’d, compressed cutting tape used to make most copies, including the originals.
Don’t get me wrong: Many originals are superb. All things being equal, I would try to find an original if I were looking for this record. But all things are never equal. There are too many variables involved in the making of a record. One can never predict what the best sounding version is gonna be.
Mobile Fidelity
We used to like the Mobile Fidelity pressing of this record, but without one around it’s hard to say what the comparison would be like today. I can tell you this much: there is plenty of deep bass on this recording.
That means that the Mobile Fidelity is not going to be able to reproduce the bass the way the real pressings do because MoFi bass is almost always wooly and never — repeat never — does it go deep.
There are no doubt other reissues of this album available now. The cheap Columbia 180 gram version put out by Scorpio is terrible; the other ones we haven’t played. Condidering the state of record remastering, we wouldn’t expect them to sound very good.