Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now
In the commentary for a recent Hot Stamper pressing, we described the sound we were looking for on the Stones’ brilliant 1978 album, Some Girls:
One of the keys to getting this album to sound right is fullness. Many copies lack weight to the bottom end, which robs this funky music of its very foundation. Other copies suffer from lean, thin-sounding vocals — do you think that’s the sound Mick Jagger (or engineer Chris Kimsey) was going for?
Some of the qualities we found in short supply on the average copy were warmth, richness, sweetness and ambience — you know, all that Analog Stuff we know and love.
Most copies are too thin and grainy for serious audiophile listening, but this one is a different story. It’s not easy to find great sound for The Stones, so take this one home for a spin if you want to hear this band bring these songs to life in your very own listening room.
Not many copies have this kind of clarity and transparency, or this kind of big, well-defined bottom end.
The sound of the hi-hat is natural and clear on this pressing, as are the vocals, which means that the tonality in the midrange is correct, and what could be more important than a good midrange? It’s where the music is.
Not only is it hard to find great copies of this album, it ain’t easy to play ’em either, which is why this recording ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale.
You’re going to need a hi-res, super low distortion front end with careful adjustment of your arm in every area — VTA, tracking weight, azimuth and anti-skate — in order to play this album properly.
If you’ve got the goods, you’re gonna love the way our Hot Stamper pressings sound.
Play it with a budget cart/table/arm and you’re likely to hear much less magic than we did.
Chris Kimsey is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers. Click on the links below to find his albums, along with plenty of our famous commentaries.
I have two personal favorites among his many excellent recordings:
- A Space in Time (1971)
- Wind of Change (1972)
Both are Must Own records in my book.
In my opinion, both are records that should be more popular with audiophiles. For some reason they are not. If you have not heard one or both of these classics, check them out. They are the very definition of the kind of Big Production Rock I have been listening to since I first fell in love with them back in the early Seventies. That was about fifty years ago and I still play them regularly for enjoyment. I have never tired of their music in all that time and I don’t think I ever will.
I’m sure you have plenty of records you feel the same way about in your collection. These are two of mine.
These are the very definition of big speaker albums. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to have most audiophile systems begging for mercy.
This is The Audio Challenge that awaits you.
If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic power, don’t expect to hear them the way Chris Kimsey and the musicians who played on them wanted you to.
Both albums want to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at.
Ten Years After and Peter Frampton are two of the most influential and important artists/bands in my growth as a music lover and audiophile, joining the ranks of Roxy Music, Ambrosia, 10cc, Steely Dan, Yes, Bowie and countless others, individuals and groups of musicians who seemed to me dedicated to exploring and exploding the conventions of popular music.
My equipment was forced to evolve in order to accurately reproduce the scores of challenging recordings issued by these groups in the ’70s.
You could say that the albums of all of these artists informed not only my taste in music but the actual stereo I play that music on. It’s what progress in audio is all about.
I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for the last five decades, precisely in order to play recordings such as these, albums with music I fell in love with back in the 70s.
Further Reading
- Record collecting for audiophiles from A to Z
- More rock and pop albums we think we know well
- More advice for what to listen for on favorite rock and pop albums
