Find a Copy with Drums that Punch Through the Mix on Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many pressings are compressed, murky, veiled and recessed. To find one that is transparent, clear, present and punchy is no mean feat.

Proper cleaning is essential. The early Orange label CBS pressings (the only ones that have the potential to win shootouts) too often just sound like old records until they have been properly cleaned.

There are two tracks to play to hear how well the drums punch through the mix.

Mick Fleetwood is banging the hell out of his toms on Black Magic Woman. If it doesn’t sound like he’s really pounding away, you need a better copy.

Or a better stereo; one must always be open to the possibility that the system may not be up to reproducing the punchiness of the drums.

Oh Well Part 1 has some big drums too, which means you can check both sides of your copy for how punchy the drums are.

Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits is a big speaker record. It requires speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

Most of the music is not in the deeper bass anyway. It’s the whack of instruments whose energy is in the lower midrange and mid-bass that screens and smallish box speakers will struggle with.

A good large-driver dynamic speaker fed by fast electronics can usually handle the energy in that range with ease.

Take this album with you next time you head to your local stereo store to audition speakers.

It will help clarify the issues. Screens and small boxes do many things well, but drums are not one of them, at least not in my experience.

This and hundreds of other albums like it are precisely the kinds of recording that drove me to pursue big stereo systems driving big dynamic speakers. You need a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t sound like live music.

If you are looking for the big sound, we have a list of Demo Discs that can deliver it like nothing you’ve ever heard.

For more what to listen for advice on other titles we have auditioned, please click here.

Further Reading

This is what my old Fulton Premiers from the 70s looked like.

I got even bigger speakers in the 90s, the Legacy Whisper System.

Both play records like this very well.

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