More of the Music of Bruce Springsteen
- A Born To Run like you’ve never heard, with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
- Not the best sounding Springsteen record – we think that’s The River – but the most groundbreaking and probably the most important
- The title track here really sounds the way you want to hear it – big, bold, and full of rock and roll energy that jumps out of the speakers (which, as most of you know, is the kind of thing that never happens when playing modern Heavy Vinyl pressings)
- A 5 star album in the AMG, and the Boss’ first Masterpiece – who can argue with the power of this music?
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- “Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums — Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it.” (Did he ever!)
This vintage Columbia pressing has 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, this is the record 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 Born To Run 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 1975
- 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.
Classic Heavy Vinyl
If you own the Classic Records reissue from the early 2000s, hearing this Hot Stamper pressing will be a revelation.
That record was as dead as a doornail — more thick, opaque and compressed than most originals, which of course have problems in all three of those areas. Bernie did the album no favors, that I can tell you.
Head to head in a shootout, our Hot Stampers will be dramatically more solid, punchy, transparent, open, clear and just plain REAL sounding, because these are all the areas in which heavy vinyl pressings tend to fall short.
But this is no Demo Disc by any means — we grade on a curve, and considering the limitations baked in to a heavily-processed pop record designed to be heard over the radio, the best copies are very good sounding for what they are.
What We’re Listening For On Born To Run
- 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
Thunder Road
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Night
Backstreets
Side Two
Born to Run
She’s the One
Meeting Across the River
Jungleland
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums — Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it. Bruce Springsteen’s make-or-break third album represented a sonic leap from his first two, which had been made for modest sums at a suburban studio; Born to Run was cut on a superstar budget, mostly at the Record Plant in New York. Springsteen’s backup band had changed, with his two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg.
The result was a full, highly produced sound that contained elements of Phil Spector’s melodramatic work of the 1960s. If The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle was an accidental miracle, Born to Run was an intentional masterpiece. It declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen’s promise, and though some thought it took itself too seriously, many found that exalting.