More Frank Sinatra

• Come Fly With Me touches down on the site for the first time ever, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this 60s Stereo Capitol pressing
• This copy was doing everything we wanted it to — and on both sides — with an abundance of energy and the kind of immediacy that can put Frank Sinatra front and center right in your very own listening room
• We all owe a debt of gratitude to the recording and mastering engineers from the era (50s and 60s) for the glorious sound they managed to achieve, a sound unequalled to this day
• Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
• 5 stars: “There may be greater albums in Sinatra’s catalog, but few are quite as fun as Come Fly With Me.”

This vintage Capitol stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern pressings cannot BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, Tubey Magical sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Frank Sinatra singing live in your listening room. The better copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of older recordings (this one is now over 65 years old), 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 less than one out of 100 new records do, if our experience with the hundreds we’ve played can serve as a guide.

What the Best Sides of Come Fly With Me 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 1958
• 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.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t veiled or smeary of course. So many things can go wrong on a record. We know, we’ve heard them all.

Top end extension is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack their full complement of harmonic information.

Tube smear is common to most vintage pressings. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have the least (or none), yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.

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 Come Fly With Me

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• 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 note-like 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

Come Fly With Me
Around The World
Isle Of Capri
Moonlight In Vermont
Autumn In New York
On The Road To Mandalay

Side Two

Let’s Get Away From It All
April In Paris
London By Night
Brazil
Blue Hawaii
It’s Nice To Go Trav’ling

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

Constructed around a light-hearted travel theme, Come Fly With Me, Frank Sinatra’s first project with arranger Billy May, was a breezy change of pace from the somber Where Are You. From the first swinging notes of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Come Fly With Me” — which is written at Sinatra’s request — it’s clear that the music on the collection is intended to be fun.

Over the course of the album, Sinatra and May travel around the world in song, performing standards like “Moonlight in Vermont” and “April in Paris,” as well as humorous tunes like “Isle of Capri” and “On the Road to Mandalay.” May’s signature bold, brassy arrangements give these songs a playful, carefree, nearly sarcastic feel, but never is the approach less than affectionate.

In fact, Come Fly With Me is filled with varying moods and textures, as it moves from boisterous swing numbers to romantic ballads, and hitting any number of emotions in between. There may be greater albums in Sinatra’s catalog, but few are quite as fun as Come Fly With Me.