Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Yes Available Now
At its best, this album is a Big Speaker Prog-Rock opus with tremendous power and dynamic range, but it takes a special pressing to really bring the album to life.
These guys — and by that I mean this particular iteration of the band, the actual players that were involved in the making of this album — came together for the first time and created the sound of Yes on this very album, rather aptly titled when you think about it.
With the amazing Eddie Offord at the board, as well as the best batch of songs ever to appear on a single Yes album, they produced both their sonic and musical masterpiece — good news for audiophiles with Big Speakers!
Drop the needle on a top copy and you will find yourself on a Yes journey the likes of which you have never known.
And that’s what I’m in this audiophile game for.
The Heavy Vinyl crowd can have their dead-as-a-doornail, wake-me-when-it’s-over pressings that are typically cheap to buy and tend to play quietly. Here’s one I couldn’t sit through with a gun to my head.
The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, ELP, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and far too many others to list.
It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted. Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn’t get any better.
Obsession
Yes, we admit to being obsessed with The Yes Album.
It is our belief that to reach the most advanced levels of audio,you have to do two things:
- You must become obsessed with getting your favorite albums to sound their best, and,
- You must then turn your obsession into concrete action.
What kind of action?
Finding better sounding pressings and improving your stereo and room.
We wrote about it here. An excerpt:
As a budding audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the 70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was then using. It’s the challenging recordings by scores of pop and rock artists that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.
And here I am — here we are — still at it, forty fifty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.
That kind of progress is proof that we’re doing it right. It’s a good test for any audiophile. If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year.
As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some of them will no doubt become more apparent. For the most part, however, with continual refinements and improvements to your system and room, vintage pressings will sound better and better the longer you stay active in the hobby.
That’s what makes it fun to play old records: The sound just keeps getting better!
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that have been winning our shootouts for decades. As of 2025, shootouts for this album should be carried out:
Nothing else will do for a big, dynamic, powerful recording such as this.
Based on our extensive experience, The Yes Album has the potential to sound its best:
Which means the conventional wisdom about British bands, recorded in British studios, producing records with superior sound on British vinyl is nothing but a crock in the case of The Yes Album.
We recently posted a lengthy commentary about conventional wisdom, attempting to make the case that, although the most common record collecting approaches are more often right than wrong, there is simply no way to know when any given approach will work for any given title.
Rather than post one exception after another — easily done, since we know of hundreds of them — we are happy to admit that the standard record collecting rules of thumb work well for most records, with the definition of “most” being “more than half the time.”
That leaves a lot of room for misses, and if those misses happen to be favorite albums of yours, tough luck. Unless…
Unless you learn how to test records properly.
Fortunately for readers of this blog, the methods you need to know are explained in full, free of charge.
Owning the highest quality pressings of your favorite music requires that you make a serious commitment of time and money.
If you really want to find great sounding pressings, you will have to do the kind of work we do, and that means buying, cleaning, playing and evaluating a big batch of copies of the same album.
It may be expensive and a huge amount of work, but our experience tells us there is simply no other way to do it.
Naturally, we are happy to do that work for you — it’s what pays the rent after all — but even if you buy armfulls of our Hot Stamper pressings, we still think that doing shootouts is by far the best way to improve your critical listening skills.
Further Reading