Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now
This is ANALOG at its Tubey Magical finest. You ain’t never gonna play a CD that sounds like this as long as you live. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but digital media are evidently incapable of reproducing this kind of sound. There are nice sounding CDs in the world but there aren’t any that sound like this, not in my experience anyway.
If you are thinking that someday a better digital system is going to come along in order to save you the trouble and expense of having to find and acquire these expensive original pressings, think again.
This is the kind of record that shows you what’s wrong with your BEST sounding CDs. (Best not to talk about the average one in your collection, or mine. The less said the better.)
This is the kind of record that somebody might hear in a stereo store and realize that the digital road he’s been going down for so many years is nothing but a sonic dead end.
The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame — we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings (that’s partly what makes them Hot Stampers, right?) will rattle the foundation of your house. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense.
It’s big bombastic Prog Rock that wants desperately to rock your world.
At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly.
At loud levels it actually will rock your world.
The Brits here really ROCK, with greater dynamic contrasts and prodigious bass, some of the best ever committed to vinyl. This music needs real whomp down below and lots of jump factor to work its magic. These Brits are super-low distortion, with an open, sweet sound, especially up top, but they still manage to convey the awesome power of the music, which no other pressings in our experience can do.
This record sounds best to us this way:
- On big speakers at loud levels
- On the right early Island pressing
- On the right British import pressing
For more modestly helpful title-specific advice, click here.
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