More of the Music of Genesis

• The Hot Stamper debut of the band’s 1983 release with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout this original British import pressing
• We shot out a number of other imports and this one had the midrange presence, bass, and dynamics that were missing from most other copies we played
• Forget the dubby domestic LPs and whatever dead-as-a-doornail Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – the UK pressings are the only way to fly on Genesis
• “…as of this record, Genesis was now primarily a pop band. Anybody who paid attention to ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘No Reply at All’ could tell that this was a good pop band, primarily thanks to the rapidly escalating confidence of Phil Collins, but Genesis illustrates just how good they could be, by balancing such sleek, pulsating pop tunes as ‘That’s All’ with a newfound touch for aching ballads, as on ‘Taking It All Too Hard.'”

This vintage UK import 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 Genesis 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 1983
• 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.

Learning the Record

For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You’ll hear what’s better and worse — right and wrong would be another way of putting it — about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own — those may or may not have Hot Stampers — but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

What We’re Listening For On Genesis

• 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 — Hugh Padgham in this instance — 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

Mama
That’s All
Home By The Sea
Second Home By The Sea

Side Two

Illegal Alien
Taking It All Too Hard
Just A Job To Do
Silver Rainbow
It’s Gonna Get Better