Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Black Sabbath Available Now
Somebody at Capitol did not do a very good job when cutting this album for members of the Capitol Record Club. The sound is papery, gritty, and, not to put too fine a point on it, just awful.
Did he try real hard and fail? Was he incompetent? Was he lazy? I doubt we’ll never know!
Discogs gives out the following info for the release:
Mastering at Artisan Sound Recorders and pressing by Columbia Records Pressing Plant, Scranton are uncredited on release.
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- Matrix / Runout (Side A ): SW-1-93896 W2#1 (IAM Scranton Identifier)
- Matrix / Runout (Side B): SW2-93896-R4 (IAM Scranton Identifier)
Hard to believe Artisan and IAM would do such a bad job, but if Discogs is to be believed, apparently it’s possible.
Not all record club pressings are bad though; that’s painting with too broad a brush.
Here’s one we are big fans of.
Of course, it helps if your record club pressings are mastered by Bill Kipper at Masterdisk.
He was one of the greats, and there is simply no one like him alive today, at least as far as we know. We had this to say about that subject many years ago:
Think what a different audio world it would be if we still had Bill Kipper with us today, along with the amazingly accurate and resolving cutting system he used at Masterdisk.
As far as we can tell, there are no records being produced today that sound remotely as good as this budget subscription disc.
Furthermore, to my knowledge no record this good has been cut for more than thirty years. The world is awash in mediocre remastered records and we want nothing to do with any of them, not when there are so many good vintage pressings still to be discovered and enjoyed.
The likes of Bill Kipper are no longer with us, but we can be thankful that we still have the records he and so many talented others mastered all those years ago, to enjoy now and for countless years to come.
Our Recent Hot Stamper Commentary for Master of Reality
These sides are big and bold with plenty of bass and driving rock energy – this is the right sound for this heavy music.
It is ridiculously tough to find copies of this album that sound this good and play this quietly, tougher even than it is for Paranoid or the first album.
Side One
Sweet Leaf
After Forever
Embryo
Children of the Grave
Side Two
Orchid
Lord of this World
Solitude
Into the Void
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
The shortest album of Black Sabbath’s glory years, Master of Reality is also their most sonically influential work. Here Tony Iommi began to experiment with tuning his guitar down three half-steps to C#, producing a sound that was darker, deeper, and sludgier than anything they’d yet committed to record. This trick was still being copied 25 years later by every metal band looking to push the limits of heaviness, from trendy nu-metallers to Swedish deathsters. Much more than that, Master of Reality essentially creates multiple metal subgenres all by itself, laying the sonic foundations for doom, stoner, AND sludge metal, all in the space of just over half an hour.
Further Reading