Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
Here is how we described our best copy of Yellow Submarine from the last shootout:
Boasting two KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage UK copy could not be beat.
Without a doubt the hardest single side of any Beatles album to find with good sound is side two of Yellow Submarine, and here’s a copy that is as good as it gets.
The only place to find the all-time classic “Hey Bulldog,” as well as “All Together Now” and “It’s All Too Much.” In addition, “All You Need Is Love” debuted in a true stereo mix on this album.
My favorite lines from the notes for the notoriously difficult-to-get-to-sound right side two:
- Big and clear and 3-D for this
- Nice string texture — sweet and rich for once
You do the best you can with what you have to work with, and normally side two of this album does not give you much to work with, as most copies are thin sounding and have screechy strings.
One or two out of ten copies — and of course we are only talking about the real vintage UK pressings, nothing else is worth bothering with — will get the strings right on side two. That makes side two a good test for string tone in our book, especially for those of you who don’t have any of our Hot Stamper orchestral pressings.
This is a very difficult album to find good sound for; many pressings are almost unbearably gritty and harsh. Fortunately, these two sides have no such problems. The overall tonality is rich and full-bodied, and there’s plenty of presence and energy as well.
A Tough Title to Play
Side two of this recording, the orchestral side, ranks high on our difficulty of reproduction scale. Do not attempt to play it using any but the best equipment.
It took us a long time to get to the point where we could clean the record properly, twenty years or so, and about the same amount of time to get the stereo to the level it needed to be, involving many of the revolutionary changes in audio we discuss at great length on the blog.
As we’ve said before about these kinds of recordings, they are designed to bring an audio system to its knees. If you have the kind of big system that a record like this demands, when you drop the needle on the best of our Hot Stamper pressings, you are going to hear some amazing sound.
This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the home audio enthusiast, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area most audiophiles neglect).
Side One
Yellow Submarine
Only A Northern Song
All Together Now
Hey Bulldog
It’s All Too Much
All You Need is Love
Side Two
Pepperland
Sea of Time
Sea of Holes
Sea of Monsters
March of the Meanies
Pepperland Laid Waste
Yellow Submarine In Pepperland
Further Reading