More of the Music of David Bowie
- Here is a copy that is doing just about everything right, with seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from top to bottom – Ziggy Stardust in analog is simply a phenomenally good sounding recording
- Side one was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
- Exceptionally (and unusually) quiet vinyl too – the quietest we have ever found
- The amount of Tubey Magic has to be heard to be believed – this is the pinnacle of sound for Glam Rock
- Until you hear one of these killer British pressings you simply cannot know what you are missing
- We know that the price we are asking is high – if we could find clean copies with the right stampers and do these shootouts more often than every five years, believe me, we would love to make these killer pressings more affordable
- A Rock & Pop Top 100 album, and Ken Scott’s engineering masterpiece all rolled into one
- 5 stars: “Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam.”
- This is a Must Own Title from 1972, a year which turned out to be a great one for Rock and Pop music.
Drop the needle on any song. We guarantee you have never heard that song sound better. The mastering is superb. There’s really no “mastering” to listen for — all you’re really aware of is the music flowing from the speakers, freed from all the limitations that you’ve had to accept over the years.
Unquestionably, this is the pinnacle of Glam Rock. Every track is superb; not a moment is less than stellar from beginning to end.
Is it Bowie’s Masterpiece?
Absolutely. No other Bowie record ranks higher in my book.
Is it amazingly well recorded?
You better believe it. This is not just Bowie’s masterpiece; it’s Ken Scott‘s as well. For BIG, BOLD, wall to wall, floor to ceiling sound, look no further. The best copies are swimming in rich, sweet TUBEY MAGIC. This is a sound we cannot get enough of here at Better Records.
Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings)
The guitars on this record are a true test of stereo reproduction. Many pressings of this album do not get the guitars to sound right. On some they will sound veiled and dull, and on a copy with a bit too much top, they will have an unfortunate hi-fi-ish sparkle, the kind that Mobile Fidelity was infamous for in the late ’70s and ’80s.
The guitars may not sound “real,” they way they actually would in real life, but they sure sound grungy and GOOD!
What The Best Sides Of Ziggy Stardust 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 1972
- 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 Tubey Magic Top Ten
You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic that exist on this recording. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Ziggy Stardust.
Ranked strictly in terms of Tubey Magic I would have to put this album on our list of Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time, right up there with, and in no particular order:
- The Beatles / Sgt. Pepper (1967),
- Dire Straits / Self-Titled (1977, and clearly the outlier in this group),
- The Doors / Self-Titled (1967),
- The Eagles / Self-Titled (1972),
- Elton John / Tumbleweed Connection (1970)
- Pink Floyd / The Dark Side of the Moon (1973),
- Cat Stevens / Tea for the Tillerman (1970),
- Ten Years After / A Space in Time (1970)
- The Who / Tommy (1969),
What We’re Listening For On Ziggy Stardust
- 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 punchy 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.
A Must Own Rock Record
Ziggy Stardust is an absolute Masterpiece that demands to be part of any serious Rock Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Side One
Five Years
Soul Love
Just listen to those cymbal crashes! When have they ever sounded better?
Moonage Daydream
Starman
It Ain’t Easy
Side Two
Lady Stardust
The piano is recorded superbly and makes a great test. It has the perfect balance of power and delicacy, not just on this track but throughout the album.
Star
Hang on to Yourself
Ziggy Stardust
Suffragette City
Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan’s glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie’s fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like “Suffragette City,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “Hang Onto Yourself,” while “Lady Stardust,” “Five Years,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust — familiar in structure, but alien in performance — is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.
Further Reading
- How to go about collecting better sounding records
- More letters, reviews and commentaries for the music of David Bowie
- More reviews and commentaries for Bowie’s Masterpiece, Ziggy Stardust
- Acquiring a good sounding record collection – Hot Stampers versus collector pressings
- Hot Stamper pressings of exceptionally Tubey Magical rock and pop records in stock now