Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now
Way back in 2009 we had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing we listed:
This German import pressing of Waiting for Columbus is much better sounding than the typical Mastering Lab-mastered copy.
This German pressing is similar to one that came from my own personal collection, accidentally discovered way back in the early ’80s as I recall. It KILLED my domestic original, and got some things right that even my treasured Mobile Fidelity pressing couldn’t. We have been meaning to do a shootout for this album for at least the last five years, but kept running into the fact that in a head to head shootout the right MoFi pressing — sloppy bass and all — was hard to beat.
This is no longer the case, courtesy of that same old laundry list you have no doubt seen on the site countless times: better equipment, tweaks, record cleaning, room treatments, et cetera, et cetera. Now the shortcomings of the MoFi are clear for all to see, and the strengths of the best non-Half-Speed mastered pressings are too, which simply means that playing the MoFi now is an excruciating experience.
All I can hear is what it does wrong.
I was so much happier with it when I didn’t know better.
That same laundry list of improvements continued to pay big dividends, and right around 2017 or so the best original domestic Mastering Lab copies started to sound much more right to us than the German ones.
The German pressings can be good, but the TML pressings are the only ones we would expect to win shootouts from now on.
But who knows? We might find something even better down the road. That’s what shootouts are for.
The Concert
Many of Little Feat’s earlier albums are difficult to find with good sound. (I won’t say they were badly recorded; I was nowhere near the studio at the time and have no idea what the real master tapes sound like. All I know is their records usually don’t sound very good.)
But this is a BEAUTIFULLY recorded concert, and the versions they do of their old material are MUCH BETTER than the studio album versions for the most part. Fat Man In A Bathtub on this album is out of this world. You will have a hard time listening to the studio versions of these songs once you have heard them performed with this kind of energy, enthusiasm and techical virtuosity. This is some of the best sounding live rock and roll sound you will ever hear outside of a concert venue.
It’s one of the greatest live rock and roll album ever made, by one of the greatest rock and roll bands to ever play, now sounding better than ever!
Three words of advice: Turn It Up. Especially side three.
Doug Sax Is The Man
The Mastering Lab was one of the greatest cutting houses to ever master records.
Doug Sax knew how to keep his lathes and tube amplifiers working at state-of-the-art levels. The sound quality is unsurpassed.
And he did it all with tubes.
He was very proud of his custom-made tube-driven cutting amps, designed by none other than his brother, Sherwood. His amps cut many of my favorite records of all time, including this one, an album that I have been using to test and improve the playback quality of my system for more than forty years.
To this day we get taken to task by some misguided individuals for criticizing his work on the awful audiophile records he made in the 90s, many of them for Analogue Productions. We stand firmly behind the criticism we made of those albums decades ago. Their sound has not improved with age, nor is it likely to.
Those records from the 90s sound nothing like the records Doug and his crew were making in the 70s.
According to the logic of our critics, if you made great records in the 70s, then you must have been making great records in the 90s, whether your name is Doug Sax, Bernie Grundman, George Marino, Robert Ludwig or any other.
This is a very crude way of understanding the work of these exceptionally talented men.
The fact that this kind of sophistry is taken seriously by supposedly grownup adults in the audiophile community is embarrassing. To those of us who have been in the hobby for decades, it comes as no surprise.
Audiophiles have always embraced bad ideas (Half-Speed mastering!) and bad records (like those found here.) Our hobby attracts large numbers of True Believers, and many of them — too many of them — latch onto conventional ideas about records and audio which are attractively convenient and comforting.
Self-evident, convenient and comforting ideas — so beautiful and beguiling — rarely get put to the test. They are a ball some audiophiles have unknowingly chained to themselves.
These superficially attractive ideas do not hold up well to scrutiny. They are mostly assumptions, and we take issue with assumptions when it comes to finding better sounding records.
For those who would like a more thorough explanation of our approach and the heterodox views it produces, we wrote about it here.
Uniquely among audiophile reviewers, empirical evidence, using large pools of data, all of it acquired scientifically, is at the heart of everything we think we know. And, as we freely admit, we still sometimes get it wrong.
As we did with Little Feat’s amazing live album.