More Live Recordings of Interest
- Journey’s 2-LP live album debuts on the site with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on all FOUR sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- Guaranteed to be a huge improvement over anything you’ve heard, these pressings are big, punchy, and full-bodied – Steve Perry’s leads really soar
- Spaciousness, richness and freedom from grit and grain are key to the best pressings, and here you will find all three
- “‘Separate Ways’ and ‘Faithfully’ were still a few years away, but the band had plenty of hits by this time and they blast through them all, including a blistering version of ‘Any Way You Want It.’ The band [is] in rare form and vocalist Steve Perry uses Captured as his coming out, while the thousands of diehards sweating in the blistering sun give the album an underlying hum of energy that tops even Perry’s.”
These vintage Columbia pressings have 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, these are the records 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 Captured 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 even as late as 1981
- 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 these records 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 these two do.
Pop and Rock Shootouts
What are the sonic qualities by which a Pop or Rock record — any Pop or Rock record — should be judged?
Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.
When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.
Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.
Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.
It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.
The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing — or your money back.
What We’re Listening For On Captured
- 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
Majestic
Where Were You
Just The Same Way
Line Of Fire
Lights
Stay Awhile
Side Two
Too Late
Dixie Highway
Feeling That Way
Anytime
Side Three
Do You Recall
Walks Like A Lady
La Do Da
Side Four
Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’
Wheel In The Sky
Any Way You Want It
The Party’s Over
About the Album
Captured is Journey’s first live album. It was released on January 30, 1981 on the Columbia Records label. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and went on to sell two million copies.
This album was recorded during the band’s Departure Tour in 1980. Tracks 1 to 4 were taken from a performance recorded at The Forum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on August 8, 1980. Tracks 5 & 6 were from the performance at the end of the tour in Koseinenkin Hall, Shinjyuku, Tokyo, Japan on October 13, 1980 and tracks 7 to 16 came from two shows at Cobo Hall in Detroit, Michigan on August 4 & 5, 1980. The song “Dixie Highway” had not previously been (nor was it subsequently) recorded on any Journey studio album. Closing the album is the lone studio track, “The Party’s Over (Hopelessly in Love),” which was released as a single.
In the liner notes, the album is dedicated to AC/DC lead singer Bon Scott, who died in February 1980. Scott is referred to as “a friend from the highway,” as AC/DC had supported Journey the previous year on their “If You Want Blood” tour.
This was the last Journey album for keyboard player and founder Gregg Rolie.
Record World called the single “The Party’s Over (Hopelessly in Love)” a “shining testimony to the band’s commanding stage presence.”
-Wikipedia