More of the Music of Queen
- This copy of Queen’s hit-filled release from 1980 boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them from start to finish
- One of our top picks for amazing Queen sound – few of their recordings can touch it for energy and size
- Plenty of hits here, including “Another One Bites The Dust” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” which both sound incredible here
- 4 1/2 stars: “… the striking difference with this album is that it finds Queen turning decidedly, decisively pop, and it’s a grand, state-of-the-art circa 1980 pop album that still stands as one of the band’s most enjoyable records.”
On this killer copy you get solid bass, Tubey Magic, breathy vocals and big, bold sound!
Compared to a lot of the copies we played, these sides have more energy, bigger bass and even more present and breathy vocals.
This is without a doubt some of the best sound we have ever heard for Queen, no ifs, ands or buts about it.
The quality of bass on this record is often superb. The best copies were Demo Discs in that regard. You have probably never heard Queen sound this good.
Take it from us, the guys who play nothing but vintage vinyl all day: not many Queen records sound as good as The Game.
The Game Rocks
The Game rocks. It’s everything we want in a good Queen record. Credit must, of course, go to their engineer, a fellow who goes by the name of Reinhold Mack. This is his first album for Queen and he really nailed it. Mack also worked with Electric Light Orchestra and those are some wonderful sounding Big Production Rock recordings.
We’re big dynamic speaker guys here at Better Records and we love the “big sound.” (Wish we could find more clean, top quality copies of ELO’s albums. With few exceptions, most of their titles are hard to come by. You don’t see many on our site for precisely the same reasons that you don’t see much Queen on our site.)
The Game is clearly one of the two best sounding records Queen ever made. Do you see a lot of Queen albums going up on the site? The demand is there, but where is the supply?
There’s a good reason for their scarcity as Hot Stampers. As much as people might love to hear some top quality pressing of Queen on vinyl, we just can’t seem to find many that do their brand of multi-layered Big Production Rock justice.
No need for Brit vinyl on The Game, thank goodness. This domestic pressing has the sound of a Master Tape, no doubt about it. The sound is superb throughout, not a claim we can make for many Queen records.
What The Best Sides Of The Game 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 even as late as 1980
- 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.
What We’re Listening For On The Game
- 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
Play the Game
Dragon Attack
Another One Bites the Dust
Need Your Loving Tonight
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Side Two
Rock It (Prime Jive)
Don’t Try Suicide
Sail Away Sweet Sister
Coming Soon
Save Me
AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review
… the striking difference with this album is that it finds Queen turning decidedly, decisively pop, and it’s a grand, state-of-the-art circa 1980 pop album that still stands as one of the band’s most enjoyable records.
Wikipedia
Queen began the 1980s with The Game. It featured the singles “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Another One Bites the Dust”, both of which reached number one in the United States. The album stayed number one for four weeks in the United States, and sold over four million copies. It was also the only album to ever top the Billboard rock, dance, and R&B charts simultaneously.
The album also marked the first appearance of a synthesiser on a Queen album. Heretofore, their albums featured a distinctive “No Synthesisers were used on this Album” sleevenote. The note is widely assumed to reflect an anti-synth, pro-“hard”-rock stance by the band, but was later revealed by producer Roy Thomas Baker to be an attempt to clarify that those albums’ multi-layered solos were created with guitars, not synths, as record company executives kept assuming at the time.