Our vintage Doors pressings — either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else will do — have the kind of Tubey Magical midrange that modern records are almost never able to reproduce.
Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.
One of The Records That Did It For Me
Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back over the last forty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with scores of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile in the first place, and stuck with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music you love sound so good?
It’s clearly an album we are obsessed with. We have written extensively about quite a number of them to date. It is our contention that to be any good at this hobby, you have to become obsessed with well-recorded albums and work out the consequences of those obsessions for yourself.
The Soft Parade was one of those albums that blew my fifteen-year-old mind. Songs for Beginners was another one.
We also wrote about the subject of being obsessed with music here. An excerpt:
As a budding audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the 70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was then using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists like them, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.
And here I am — here we are — still at it, forty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.
That kind of progress is proof that we’re doing it right. It’s a good test for any audiophile. If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year.
As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some of them will no doubt become more apparent. For the most part, however, with continual refinements and improvements to your system and room, vintage pressings will continue to sound better the longer you stay active in the hobby.
That’s what makes it fun to play old records: They just keep getting better.
The Typical Soft Parade LP
The sound of most pressings of The Soft Parade is just plain terrible. The brass that opens side one is often so pinched, compressed, grainy and aggressive it will practically make your hair stand on end. Almost all the post-Big-Red-E reissue LPs sound like they are made from sub-generation EQ’d compressed tape copies, what are commonly called cutting masters. So many reissues have such a similar character that it’s hard to imagine they’re not all sourced from the same bad “master.”
Need I even mention how much better this copy sounds than the recent 180g version from the Rhino Box Set, digitally remastered by Bernie Grundman? That thing is just awful, possibly the worst sounding pressing I have ever heard. The Gold CD Hoffman did for Audio Fidelity would be night and day better. So much for the concept of vinyl superiority. Not with Bernie at the helm anyway.
Add to that the fact that almost every copy you pick up will have a pronounced HONK in the midrange, giving you that not-so-fondly remembered AM radio sound we’ve all heard on copy after incompetently-mastered, pressed-on-cardboard copy. (And the awful Bruce Botnick engineered CDs too; can’t forget those. If you can’t afford the DCC Gold discs for The Doors’ catalog, you are in for some shockingly mid-fi sound.)
This album checks off many of our favorite boxes:
- It’s a personal favorite
- It’s a masterpiece of rock and pop
- It’s a Demo Disc on big speakers that play at loud levels
- It’s part of the core collection of well recorded rock & pop albums
In addition:
Side One
Tell All the People
Jim Morrison, a man with no professional experience as a singer before he formed The Doors, was blessed with one of the most beautiful baritones in the history of Rock and Roll. If his voice isn’t rich, full and Tubey Magical on this track, the sound on side one isn’t likely to be either. If that’s the case you are not in for an easy ride my friend. Chuck that sucker in the trade-in pile and move on.
Touch Me
There’s big bass on this track; you need to be able to hear it right from the start or this track is going to sound like it’s playing through a car radio.
Listen also for the texture on the strings. If you have that rare, tonally correct early pressing with a real top end, the strings won’t sound steely, strident or smeared (the three S’s, don’t you know).
Shaman’s Blues
Do It
Easy Ride
Side Two
Wild Child
Runnin’ Blue
Fiddle and mandolin (we thought it might be a banjo at first but we’re pretty sure it’s a mandolin; listen for strumming at the end) accompaniment on a Doors song? Hey, why not? Let the guys stretch out a bit. That’s what this album is all about. They’re not trying to be Blood Sweat and Tears. They’re trying to add some new colors to their palette, and I for one am glad they did. (When they went back to basics for Morrison Hotel, they turned in one of their weakest efforts ever, if not The Weakest.)
Wishful Sinful
Bruce Botnick Tubey Magic To Die For! Does it get any better for audiophiles than this?
Listen for the lovely timbre of the oboe, a featured element of this track. The orchestral arrangements here rival those of the legendary George Martin (himself an accomplished oboist, bet you didn’t know that!). If large scale orchestral arrangements are good enough for The Beatles, how can The Doors be criticised for incorporating them into their music?
The Soft Parade
This extended suite may be an example where the band’s reach exceeded their grasp; not all of this song works as well as one might wish, but the parts that do work are so good, the song’s shortcomings are easily overlooked.
Ya gotta love that spoken word intro. Once you’ve heard it you’ll never forget it, as long as you live. The best early copies (gold label or big red E) have echo bouncing off every wall of the studio endlessly. The weight the best copies have below 250 cycles is where much of the studio ambience is. Play the typical leaned-out copy and all that space collapses.
Further Reading