Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now
Until about 2007, Thick as a Brick was the undiscovered gem (by me anyway) in the Tull catalog. The pressings we’d heard up until then were nothing special, and of course the average pressing of this album is exactly that: no great shakes.
With the advent of better record cleaning fluids and much better tables, phono stages, room treatments and the like — taking full advantage of the remarkable number of revolutions in audio that have occurred over the last two or three decades –some copies of Thick As A Brick have shown themselves to be truly amazing sounding. Even the All Music Guide could hear how well-engineered the album was.
Marking Two Milestones from the Past
The 2007 commentary you see below discusses the pros and cons of both the British and Domestic original pressings. With continuing improvements to the system, room, etc., it would not be long before we realized that the British pressings were simply not competitive with the best domestic ones.
You might say this record helped us mark two important milestones in the developing history of Better Records.
The first, around 2007, was recognized by the fact that we had improved our playback to a very high level, one high enough to reproduce the album with all the clarity, size and energy we were shocked to hear at the time.
The second milestone would result from the audio changes we continued to make for the next couple of years, from 2007 to 2010, which allowed us to recognize that the best British pressings, as good as they might be, were not in the same league as the best domestic ones. We broke down in detail exactly what we were listening for and what were hearing in this commentary, and the Brits were clearly not cutting it at the highest levels by 2010.
If you find yourself with one of more British copies of the album that you think have superior sound — any copies of the album, really — we would love to send you one of our Hot Stampers so you can hear what you are missing.
The Brit is a great sounding record, don’t get us wrong.
However, head to head against our killer domestic pressings, its shortcomings should be obvious. This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.
Our Commentary from 2007
This pressing of Thick As A Brick is clearly one of the very best side twos we have ever played. It takes the recording to a whole new level. It has HUGE, room-filling, hi-definition sound with levels of Tubey Magic you simply are not prepared to hear. The transparency and the clarity are mind-boggling. It’s a White Hot Demo Disc of the highest order.
It’s got all the rock energy and whomp of the best domestics coupled with the transparency, clarity, extended top end and Tubey Magic of the best Brits. And it’s QUIET on this side. White Hot and quiet? What are the chances? You could play twenty copies and not find one with this kind of sound on vinyl this quiet. (Fifty if you don’t clean them right, and cleaning fifty copies is a lot of work.)
I would have to say that this side two would easily rank as one of the Ten Best Rock Demo Discs ever made. This is the sound of complex analog at its best.
To say this is a sonic and musical masterpiece practically without equal in the history of the world is no overstatement. But you have to have a copy like this for that statement to be true. This copy had us in the studio with Jethro Tull. It was nothing short of breathtaking. I will be thinking about this record for a long time, long after it has gone to a good home. You don’t easily forget this kind of sound.
As noted above, this pressing gets you the dynamics, energy and presence of the best copies we have ever played. The sound is jumping out of the speakers, tonally correct and fully extended from top to bottom, and just plain BIGGER and BOLDER than we heard on any other copies.
This Is the Sound
This is the sound we spend our days looking for. If you’ve got the system that can play an album of this size and power, you will hear exactly what we mean.
When you can hear it right, the music really comes to life and starts to work its magic. All the variations on the themes separate themselves out. Each of the sections, rather than sounding repetitive or monotonous, instead develop in ways both clever and engaging. The more times you listen to it, the more nuances and subtleties you will find hidden in the dense complexity.
Just the number of time-signature changes on either side is enough to boggle the mind. Of course, if you listen very carefully you can hear that most of them are accompanied by edits, but it’s fun to listen for those too!
Simply put, the more you play it the better you will understand it and the more you will like it. This is of course the hallmark of all good music.
Further Reading