More Live Recordings of Interest
- The Weavers At Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2 appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout this original Stereo Vanguard pressing
- These are just a few of the things we had to say about this stunning copy in our notes: “tubey and 3D and weighty”…”very full and detailed vox”…”sweet and tubey and present”…”so much space and bass”
- Both of these sides are rich and full, Tubey Magical, and tonally correct from top to bottom
- The sound is big and open, with the performers front and center (as well as left and right)
- Our notes for the early red label mono pressing we played noted that it was “crude, congested and awful.”
- There are plenty of mono pressings on Vanguard with excellent sound, but this is not one of them
- 4 1/2 stars: “By April 1, 1960 [at the time of the album’s recording]…the Weavers had overcome the loss of Pete Seeger and fully integrated his replacement, Erik Darling, who proved a banjo virtuoso and exuberant humorist (listen to his kazoo solo on “Bill Bailey Come Home”). They had an excellent act, mixing old favorites dating back to the days of the Almanac Singers (“The Sinking of the Reuben James”) and newer songs that would become standards of the folk boom (“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream).”
This vintage Vanguard pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What The Best Sides Of …At Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2 Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1960
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
Learning the Record
For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.
If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You’ll hear what’s better and worse — right and wrong would be another way of putting it — about the sound.
This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own — those may or may not have Hot Stampers — but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.
What We’re Listening For On …At Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
On My Journey
Born In East Virginia
Bill Bailey Come Home
Sinking Of The Reuben James
Good Old Bowling Green
There Once Was A Young Man Who Went To The City
Subo
Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream
Marching To Pretoria
Side Two
Stewball
Below The Gallows Tree
Tapuach Hineni
Universal Folk Song
Run Come See
Buttermilk Hill
Amazing Grace
Virgin Mary
New Jerusalem
AMG 4 1/2 Star Review
By April 1, 1960, when they recorded their fifth Vanguard album (which was their third live disc and second to be recorded at Carnegie Hall), the Weavers had overcome the loss of Pete Seeger and fully integrated his replacement, Erik Darling, who proved a banjo virtuoso and exuberant humorist (listen to his kazoo solo on “Bill Bailey Come Home”).
They had an excellent act, mixing old favorites dating back to the days of the Almanac Singers (“The Sinking of the Reuben James”) and newer songs that would become standards of the folk boom (“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream”). And, at least at this point, they seemed to be riding the crest of that boom, which they had inspired with their 1955 Carnegie Hall show, recorded for their first Vanguard album, The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (1957), which belatedly jumped into the album charts a couple of months after this album became their chart debut at the start of 1961.
In retrospect, however, the cannily titled Vol. 2 (you’d think it was more from the first concert, wouldn’t you?) represented the peak of the Weavers’ comeback; in 60s terms, with their bow ties and tuxedos, they seemed like something from an earlier time compared to the collegiate earnestness of the Kingston Trio and the political seriousness of Peter, Paul and Mary (who debuted the following year) — and, of course, they were. But with The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, Vol. 2 however briefly, they finally exorcised the ghost of Seeger and demonstrated that they were a valid and popular act on their own.