Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now
Sonic Grade: C-
The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.
It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.
As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.
Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.
Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?
You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.
What to Listen For
As a general rule, this DCC Heavy Vinyl pressing, like so many of those mastered by Steve Hoffman, will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:
- It will tend to lack ambience, size and space.
- It will tend to lack energy.
- It will tend to lack presence.
- It will tend to be overly rich.
- It will tend to be overly smooth.
- It will tend to lack transparency.
We’ve written quite a bit about the album, and you can find our reviews and commentaries for Pet Sounds on this very blog.
[1]
The Hot Stamper pressings we offer on the site come with this warning:
There have been a great many versions of Pet Sounds released on vinyl over the years, and most of them in our opinion are awful. (The DCC is acceptable at best.) We’re not going to give away what pressing this is, mostly because it took us many years, a huge amount of effort, and quite a large supply of expensive, ultimately rejected pressings in order to finally figure out what version of Pet Sounds sounds the best.
In short, we ask that you please not order this copy of Pet Sounds expecting to receive an original pressing. We’ve never heard an original that sounded better than tolerable, and tolerable is simply not going to cut it for a Hot Stamper, not at these prices anyway.
What you will receive is the only version of the material that has ever sounded right to us, and naturally that means it will be made from the original mono mix. We would be very surprised to discover another pressing that can compete with it.
As per our policy, if for any reason you are not happy with the sound of the album we send you (or the condition, or the cover, or absolutely anything else, that’s our policy and always has been), feel free to return it for a full refund.
Further Reading