We try to be upfront with our customers that the Hot Stamper pressings of Brothers in Arms on our site have many nice qualities, but some of the best qualities of analog recordings from the 50s, 60s and 70s are not among them.
It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. We want our customers to know what to expect when they buy a modern recording, and, having played copies of this album (as well as Love Over Gold) by the score, we are qualified to tell them what even the best pressings do not do as well as we might like. In a recent listing we introduced one of the best sounding pressings from our last shootout this way:
- Tonally correct from start to finish, with a solid bottom and fairly natural vocals (for this particular recording of course), here is the sound they were going for in the studio
- Drop the needle on “So Far Away” – it’s airy, open, and spacious, yet still rich and full-bodied
- We admit that the sound may be too processed and lacking in Tubey Magic for some
- When it comes to Tubey Magic, there simply is none — that’s not the sound Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who won the Grammy for this album, was going for
- We find that the best properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, when played at good loud levels on our system, give us sound that was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, glorious, powerful and exciting — just not Tubey Magical
The notes you see below catalog the qualities of our 2025 Shootout Winner.
Side One
Track One (So Far Away)
- Meaty guitar and bass
- Big, weighty and present
Track Two (Money for Nothing)
- Wide, full and weighty
- Lots of punch
Side Two
Track One (Ride Across the River)
- Tight, deep and weighty [bass]
- Vocals are sweet and present
- Most space yet
- Rich too
Note that the person doing the listening confined himself to what the record was doing right. In the case of this Shootout Winning Top Shelf 3/3 pressing, there really wasn’t any aspect of the sound to find fault with. As far as we were concerned, the record was doing what the record was trying to do, and doing it better than any of the other copies we played, hence the high grades.
If you have five or ten early domestic pressings of Brothers in Arms, you can judge them accurately by limiting yourself to the qualities the best of them have. For any copy you might play, you could ask:
- How big is it?
- How weighty is it?
- How present is it?
- How wide is the soundstage?
- How full-bodied is the sound?
- How punchy is it?
- How tight, deep and weighty is the bass?
- How sweet and present are the vocals?
- How much space does the recording have?
- How rich is the sound?
If your equipment, room, electricity, etc. are good enough, and your front end is properly set up, all these questions can be answered with relatively little effort. You could even create a checklist of them after playing a few copies and hearing what the best of them did well.
The one aspect of the sound that you can’t use to judge this particular recording is how much Tubey Magic it has, because the amount it has is practically undetectable.
The opposite of that approach to judging the sound of a Dire Straits release, however, would be precisely the right one to take with their self-titled debut album. The Tubey Magic is off the scales on the best copies of that title, the reason we found a spot for it on our List of the Ten Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time.
In 1977 Rhett Davies, its brilliantly talented engineer, could get that sound on tape like nobody’s business. By 1985, Neil Dorfsman, the engineer for Brothers in Arms, didn’t seem to want anything to do with that sound.
Plenty of folks in the know heard things his way as they saw fit to award him the Best Engineering Grammy for the album that year. I never agreed with those folks, and I never particularly liked the sound of the album, but I did learn a lot by playing the copy that Geoff Edgers brought to the studio for me to judge. We were in the early stages of discussing the story about audiophiles and records that he wanted to do for The Washington Post (which eventually became this video.) I was shocked to hear a modern record sound good, but here one was and there was no denying it.
Years later I was asked in a video roundtable if I liked any modern mastering engineers, and the only one I could think of was Chris Bellman, because he mastered one of the few Heavy Vinyl pressing I had ever heard that sounded any good to me, Brothers in Arms, released by — gulp! — Rhino Records on two discs in 2021.
My best copy was clearly better in some important ways, but Bellman’s sounded right, and that surprised the hell out of me because almost all of the modern records we play sound funny and weird and rarely if ever sound right.
Further Reading