More of the Music of The Moody Blues
- Here is a vintage UK pressing with incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish – just shy of our Shootout Winner
- You will not believe how punchy, lively, dynamic, and exciting some of these tracks sound here – this is one of their best albums for both music and sound
- We shot out a number of other British imports (the only copies that sound any good to us) and this one had better midrange presence, bass, and dynamics than practically any other copy we played
- 4 1/2 stars: “… [I]n 1969 this was envelope-ripping, genre-busting music, scaling established boundaries into unknown territory, not only ‘outside the box’ but outside of any musical box that had been conceived at that moment…”
Both sides give you silky highs, surprising clarity, amazing openness and transparency, real weight to the bottom end, lots of air in the flutes, wonderful texture to the strings, and so much more. The acoustic guitars sound impressive, with the proper balance between pluck and body. The vocals are shockingly clean and clear throughout.
Copies like this bring all the psychedelic Moody Blues magic to life in your living room. The richness, sweetness, and warmth on this one give you exactly the sound you want for this wild music. You get lovely Tubey Magic and clarity. The sound is cleaner, clearer, richer, sweeter, and more present that you could have imagined.
It has been my experience that, as good as the British originals of the Moody Blues records are — and I think they are the best sounding pressings of their music that can be found — their one consistent shortcoming is an overly smooth top end. We managed to find a handful of copies that break with that tradition, and the results are wonderful.
What the Best Sides of On The Threshold Of A Dream 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 1969
- 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.
No Sacrifice Necessary – You Can Have It All
Allow me to steal some commentary from our last Moody Blues Hot Stamper shootout winner, the one we did for the wonderful Lost Chord, in which we say that all the clarity and resolution comes…
WITHOUT SACRIFICING the Tubey Magical richness, warmth and lushness for which the Moody Blues recordings are justifiably famous. I’m not kidding — this pressing presents this music in a way that no previous LP of it that I’ve ever played could. It’s so correct from top to bottom, so present and alive, while still retaining all the richness and sweetness we expect from British Moody Blues records, that I find it hard to believe you can do any better, in this life anyway. This copy managed to take the Moodies’ wonderful music to another level. It’s the very definition of a Hot Stamper.
What We’re Listening For on On The Threshold Of A Dream
- 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
In the Beginning
Lovely to See You
Dear Diary
Send Me No Wine
To Share Our Love
So Deep Within You
Side Two
Never Comes the Day
Lazy Day
Are You Sitting Comfortably?
The Dream
Have You Heard, Pt. 1
The Voyage
Have You Heard, Pt. 2
AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review
On the original LP’s first side (which was the more rock-oriented side), the songs “Lovely to See You,” “Send Me No Wine,” “To Share Our Love,” and “So Deep Within You” all featured killer guitar hooks (electric and acoustic) and fills by Justin Hayward; beautiful, muscular bass from John Lodge; and vocal hooks everywhere.
It’s also a surprisingly hard-rocking album considering the amount of overdubbing that went into perfecting the songs, including cellos, wind and reed instruments, and lots of vocal layers — yet it even found room to display a pop-soul edge on “So Deep Within You” (a number that the Four Tops later recorded)…
… [I]n 1969 this was envelope-ripping, genre-busting music, scaling established boundaries into unknown territory, not only “outside the box” but outside of any musical box that had been conceived at that moment — perhaps it can be considered rock’s flirtation with the territory covered by works such as Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium, and if it overreached (as did Scriabin), well, so did a lot of other people at the time, including Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who, et al…
Amazingly, On the Threshold of a Dream was their first chart-topping LP in England, and remained on the charts for an astonishing 70 weeks.
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
As of 2024, shootouts for this album should be carried out:
How else can you expect to hear this record at its best?
Based on our experience, On The Threshold Of A Dream sounds its best:
Discography
Hot Stamper shootouts have been done for all their records with the exception of Go Now (which never sounds good as far as we know).
- Go Now! (a.k.a. The Magnificent Moodies) (1965)
- Days of Future Passed (1967)
- In Search of the Lost Chord (1968)
- On the Threshold of a Dream (1969)
- To Our Children’s Children’s Children (1969)
- A Question of Balance (1970)
- Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1971)
- Seventh Sojourn (1972)