I have two personal favorites among his many excellent recordings.
Both are Must Own records in my book. Masterpieces even.
Ten Years After – A Space in Time and Peter Frampton – Wind of Change.
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 either of them in all that time and I doubt I ever will.
They are the very definition of big speaker albums. The better pressings have the kind of energy in their grooves that is sure to leave 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 firepower, don’t expect to hear them the way Chris Kimsey wanted you to.
Both albums want to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at doing.
In order to accurately reproduce the scores of challenging recordings issued by these groups, my 70s state-of-the-art system needed to be a lot better than it was when I first assembled it.
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, this one.
A number of Chris Kimsey’s recordings challenged me to up my audiophile game in order to reproduce them better. The effort was clearly worth it, because without great albums like Wind of Change and A Space in Time, can I really say I would have devoted so much time, effort and money to this hobby? Would Hot Stampers exist as a business if I wasn’t obsessed with listening to the amazing recordings the 70s produced by the score?
I’ve had large scale dynamic speakers for the last four decades, precisely in order to play recordings such as these, albums I fell in love with many, many decades ago.
Below you will see Chris Kimsey holding up a copy of Emotional Rescue, not one of his better efforts.
And not one of his better photos, but this is the guy that engineered some of the truly wonderful albums that I’ve been playing and loving for all of my life, starting at 17.
I cannot possibly thank him enough.
Further Reading
- Getting serious about audio
- Was 1970 the best year ever for rock and pop music?
- A Space In Time is one of the records that helped us dramatically improve our playback quality
