Month: September 2024

Herbie Mann – Impressions of the Middle East

More Jazz Recordings of Interest

More Recordings Engineered by Tom Dowd

  • Impressions of the Middle East debuts on the site on this early Green and Blue Stereo Atlantic pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Exceptionally spacious, tubey and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied — this is the sound of vintage jazz
  • Phil Iehle and Tom Dowd made up the engineering team for these sessions, which explains why the better copies of the album sound so damn good
  • If you’re looking for a little something different, with outstanding vintage 60s jazz sound, this is guaranteed to be worth your while, and if not, just send it back and we’ll let someone else give it a try
  • It’s yet another recording we’ve discovered with (potentially) excellent sound

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Strawberry Cut By Far the Best Sounding Pressings of Zenyatta Mondatta

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sting and The Police Available Now

Forget the domestic pressings, forget the lightweight Nautilus Half-Speed, forget whatever lame reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper UK pressing is the only way to go.

And take it from us, you need to see that little Strawberry marking in the dead wax of your UK pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.

Why go to all that trouble? Because the album is an absolute classic – it leads off with “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and never lets up. (Well, toward the end of side two it lets up, but it’s plenty strong before then.)

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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Tom Waits – Rain Dogs

More Tom Waits

More 5 Star Albums

  • Here is an original Island pressing (one of only a handful of copies to ever hit the site) with two solid Double Plus (A++) sides
  • The sound is rich and full-bodied with much less grain and much more Tubey Magic than most of the other copies we played
  • A superb pressing with energy and presence that positively jumps out of the speakers, two of the qualities that we prize most highly in our Hot Stampers, and two of things among many that Heavy Vinyl does so poorly
  • “Rain Dogs ranked first among NME’s ‘Albums of the Year.’ In later assessments, Pitchfork listed Rain Dogs as 8th best album of the 1980s, and Slant Magazine listed the album at number 14 on its list of ‘Best Albums of the 1980s.’ Rolling Stone listed it as number 21 on its list of ‘100 Best Albums of the Eighties’… The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.” – Wikipedia

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John Coltrane – On A Misty Night

More John Coltrane

  • This wonderful double album reissue from 1978 (only the second copy to ever hit the site) boasts roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) MONO sound on all FOUR sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner (side three actually won the shootout)
  • Includes the complete 1957 albums Tenor Conclave with Hank Mobley, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims, and Mating Call with Tadd Dameron
  • Exceptionally spacious and three-dimensional, as well as relaxed and full-bodied (thanks, RVG!) – these pressings were a big step up over practically every other copy we played
  • The transfers from 1978 by David Turner are in tune with the sound of these recordings – there’s not a trace of phony EQ on any of these four sides
  • 4 stars: “…the title piece, “On a Misty Night” [is] a lovely excursion that provides Coltrane the chance to let loose with his trademark lyrical phrasing. One need only hear the sweet and sinuous opening to realize the presence of true genius.”

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Listening in Depth to Katy Lied

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

As a huge Steely Dan fan starting with their second album, Countdown to Ecstasy, in 1975 I went right down to my local Tower Records and bought Katy Lied as soon as it came out. It has been a personal favorite since the day I first played it.

Much like our longstanding customer Roger, when the album didn’t sound all that good to me, I just assumed it was a bad recording. 35 years of hard work and perseverance later, I was finally able to hear the album in all its glory.

It’s only fitting that it’s a member of our extensive listening in depth series.

Any record we get obsessed with tends to get played hundreds and hundreds of times. Knowing the record as well as we do makes it easy to recognize what to listen for in order to separate the best copies from the merely good ones.

And of course, as a card carrying audiophile, I had to buy the MoFi pressing when it came out a few years later. A company that would release a record with sound that bad should have gone out of business a long time ago. For some reason they are still in business, a fact that does not reflect well on the audiophile community.

The Key

The trick with Katy Lied Is to find the right balance between richness, sweetness and clarity.

Take three or four Katy Lied pressings, clean them up and play just one or two of the tracks we discuss below. On a highly resolving system, you shouldn’t be able to find any two copies that get those tracks to sound the same. We used to do our shootouts with up to a dozen copies at a time — now more like 6-8 since we can’t find that many clean copies anymore — and no two sound the same to us.

Side One

Black Friday

Arguably the most musically aggressive track on the album, “Black Friday” is without question the most sonically aggressive and a quick indicator of what you can expect from the rest of the side. The typical copy is an overly-compressed sonic assault on the ears. The glaring upper midrange and tizzy grit that passes for highs will have you jumping out of your easy chair to turn down the volume. Even my younger employees who grew up playing in loud punk rock bands were cringing at the sound.

However, the good copies take this aggressive energy and turn it into pure excitement. The boys are ready to rock, and they’ve got the pulsing bass, hammering drums, and screaming guitars to do it.

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Def Leppard – Pyromania

More Rock Classics

Hot Stamper Albums with Huge Choruses

  • Pyromania is back on the site after a fifteen month hiatus, here with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • These are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “huge and rich and jumping out of the speakers”…”rich and punchy and relaxed”…”breathy vox”…”heavy, full-bodied bass”…”silky and present”…”full extended from top to bottom”
  • Finding a copy of this album that gets big and loud but stays rich and clear doing it is no small feat, but for all you fans of Glam and Metal, here’s one that pulls it off
  • 5 stars: “While Def Leppard had obviously wanted to write big-sounding anthems on their previous records, Pyromania was where the band’s vision coalesced and gelled into something more. Robert John “Mutt” Lange‘s buffed-to-a-sheen production – polished drum and guitar sounds, multi-tracked layers of vocal harmonies, a general sanding of any and all musical rough edges, and a perfectionistic attention to detail – set the style for much of the melodic hard rock that followed.”

Three distinctive qualities of vintage analog recordings — richness, sweetness and freedom from artificiality — are most clearly heard on a Big Production Rock Record like Pyromania in the loudest, densest, most climactic choruses of the songs.

We set the playback volume so that the loudest parts of the record are as huge and powerful as they can possibly become without crossing the line into distortion or congestion. On some records, Dark Side of the Moon comes instantly to mind, the guitar solos on Money are the loudest thing on the record.

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Leonard Cohen – Songs From A Room

More Leonard Cohen

More Singer-Songwriter Albums

  • Boasting two INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this Stereo 360 pressing is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Songs from a Room you’ve heard
  • Cohen is front and center, his breathy vocals conveying the honesty that is the hallmark of the man, possibly the most confessional of all the singer songwriters from this era
  • This is a lot of money for a slightly noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound the way very few copies in our experience can sound
  • 4 stars: “Songs from a Room’s strongest moments convey a naked intimacy and fearless emotional honesty that’s every bit as powerful as the debut, and it left no doubt that Cohen was a major creative force in contemporary songwriting.”
  • This is a Must Own Classic from 1969 that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection

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Frank Sinatra – Sinatra’s Sinatra

More Frank Sinatra

More Nelson Riddle

  • Sinatra’s wonderful 1963 release finally returns with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound throughout
  • Forget the reissues – the stereo original we are offering here is the only way to go if rich, tubey, dynamic, musical sound is what you are after
  • Frank rerecorded some of his biggest hits in stereo for this album – the record is just one Sinatra Classic after another
  • “Some of his biggest hits and most famous songs are included in his picks, including “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Young at Heart.””
  • Amazon 5 Stars: “Riddle’s arrangements are, as always, top-notch, and Sinatra is in fine, engaging form.”

Great bass and weight coupled with lots of space and correct tonality in the midrange add up to only one thing: Triple Plus or close to it sound on both sides!

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top (to keep the strings from becoming shrill) did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record! We know, we heard them all.

We know a fair bit about the man’s recordings at this point. As of today we’ve done commentaries for more than 21 different Sinatra shootouts, and that’s not even counting the ten or twenty other titles that either bombed or were sold off years ago. (more…)

Bose Salutes the Sound Of Mercury Records (and Some Audio Lessons Learned Long Ago)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Mercury Recordings Available Now

This Bose / Mercury Demonstration LP is autographed by none other than Amar G. Bose. The autograph reads “To EMI, with regards and best wishes, Amar G. Bose.”

Bose may not have ever made very good speakers, but they sure knew good recordings when they heard them. This LP has excerpts from some of the top Mercury titles, including music by Copland (El Salon Mexico), Kodaly (Hary Janos Suite), Mussorgsky/ Ravel (Pictures At An Exhibition), and Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian Easter Overture).

I played one of these Bose records years ago and was surprised at how good it sounded. The transfers of the Mercury tapes were excellent. I guess that makes sense — if you want to show off your speakers you had better use a well-mastered record for the demonstration.

I was duped into buying my first real audiophile speaker, Infinity Monitors, when the clever salesman played Sheffield’s S9 through them. I bought them on the spot. It was only later when I got home that none of my other records sounded as good, or even good for that matter. That was my first exposure to a Direct to Disc recording.

To this day I can still picture the room the Infinity’s were playing in. It was a watershed moment in my audiophile life.

And of course I couldn’t wait to get rid of them once I’d heard them in my own system with my own records. I quickly traded them in for a pair of RTR 280-DRs. Now that was a great speaker! A 15 panel RTR Electrostatic unit for the highs; lots of woofers and mids and even a piezo tweeter for the rest. More than 5 feet tall and well over 100 pounds each, that speaker ROCKED.

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Yes, It Certainly Is a Question of Balance

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

Recently we played an early UK pressing that boasted two seriously good sounding sides.

It was huge and spacious, as well as wonderfully Tubey Magical. To our way of thinking, if that isn’t exactly the way the band wanted to sound in 1970, we can’t imagine what would be.

A Question of Balance has some of the best Moody Blues sound we’ve ever heard – it’s a truly exceptional recording in their canon. And it includes the big hit “Question,” one of the all time greats by the band.

Achieving just the right balance of “Moody Blues Sound” and transparency is no mean feat.

  • You have to be using the real master tape for starters.
  • Then you need top end extension, a very rare quality on these imports.
  • Finally, you need good bass definition to keep the bottom end from blurring and bleeding into the midrange.

No domestic copy in our experience has ever had these three qualities, and only the best of the British imports (no Dutch, German or Japanese need apply) manages to get all three on the same LP.

Allow me to steal some commentary from a Moody Blues Hot Stamper shootout we did years ago, for the wonderful In Search of the Lost Chord, in which we said that, on the best Hot Stamper pressings, the clarity and resolution come without sacrificing the Tubey Magical richness, warmth and lushness for which Moody Blues recordings are justifiably famous.

Typically

Moody Blues albums are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for the problem, but copies like this tell a different story.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for. It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the music with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes, and for that this is the kind of sound that works the best.

Domestic Moody Blues LPs

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and good imports, you know that the imports just kill the American LPs. Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, which means they tend to sound more smeary, yet they’re also thinner, brighter and more transistory.

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