CD Advice

Wheels of Fire and its Glaring Lack of Bass

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

It’s EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to find even decent sounding copies of this album. We’ve played SCORES of original domestic copies, original imports, and all kinds of reissues — trust me, most of them would make you cringe.

When you get a good copy, this music is AWESOME! For ’60s power trio hard rock, you just can’t do much better than the studio material.

White Room, Sitting On Top Of The World, Politician, Born Under A Bad Sign — this is the very essence of Classic Blues Rock. Unfortunately, the typical copy barely hints at the potential of this recording, and the audiophile pressings are even worse.

The DCC Gold CDs are especially bad in our opinion; they sound nothing like the good pressings we’ve played over the years.

Where’s The Bass?

Most early pressings you find these days are thrashed beyond belief. We used to pick up every clean Plum & Gold label copy we’d find back in he day, but no more. We gave up. The Cream magic was just plain missing from the early domestic pressings. The problem is simple: a glaring lack of bass.

Let’s think about that. Cream is a power trio. The music absolutely demands a solid, weighty bottom end. Sacrifice the bass and the sound is just too lean to rock.

We can sum up the sound of the whomp-less copies in a word: fatiguing. As is always the case, some copies sound better than others, but none could give us the kind of bass that we were hoping for. (more…)

Compare the Gold CD and the Vinyl on The Original Soundtrack

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written sometime around 2004 I imagine. It references my old Legacy Whisper Speaker system, which I permanently replaced with the Legacy Focus shortly thereafter.

We sold off our Whispers long ago. You can read all about what we use now to find our Hot Stamper pressings in this listing.

As good as the DCC Gold CD is, this record has all the MAGIC of ANALOG vinyl — and then some. It’s the kind of sound you will never hear coming from a CD or digital source of any kind, trust me.

If there isn’t a huge difference in sound between the Hoffman DCC gold CD and your LP, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that you:

A.) Need a better front end (turntable, arm, cart, phono stage — which of course we are happy to help you acquire) or,

B.) You have a second- or third-rate pressing of the vinyl. 

UPDATE 2023

Note that as of 2023, we offer only a few select pieces of equipment: the Dynavector 17dx, the Townshend Platform 9which you can now buy directly from them at a better price), the EAR 324p phono stage, the Triplanar tonearm and maybe one or two more. Email for details if you are interested in any of the above.

Most likely it would be a combination of the two, which, if I can say it without sounding too smug or arrogant, is the most likely scenario.

I haven’t run into too many audiophiles who own a hot copy of The Original Soundtrack, or have the kind of system that can play a record like it. As I am fond of saying, this is the kind of record that is guaranteed to bring any audiophile stereo to its knees.

The recording itself is a tour de force, one reason I’ve been demonstrating my stereo with it for more than thirty years. The extended suite that opens side one, One Night in Paris, has ambience, sound effects, and incredibly dynamic multi-tracked vocals at its climax that will make your jaw drop.

Reinventing The Wall of Sound The Right Way

This is the kind of record that makes you sit up and take notice. It’s classic 10cc everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “Wall of Sound” sound (minus the Phil Spector distortion), the kind big speaker guys like me live for. Supertramp, Yes, Ambrosia, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Zeppelin, Bowie — to this day I’m a sucker for that Cinerama-size soundstage these bands like to play on. It’s one of the reasons I am a proud owner of the Legacy Whisper speaker system, complete with its eight fifteen inch woofer driver complement. You need that kind of piston power to produce The Really Big Sound with Super Low Distortion at Very High Levels. The louder the better. (We have a pair of highly modified Focuses set up in our listening room as well. Three twelves per channel moves a fair amount of air too.)

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Stripped – Bad on CD, Way Better on Vinyl

The best record The Rolling Stones made in the last 20 years! Superb sound. Highly recommended.  The CD sucks and the vinyl is rare and pricey but worth every penny.

By 1995 records like this were only released on import vinyl and typically went out of print soon after they began their descent down the pop charts. I used to review them and sell the better sounding ones back in the day. Supplies were extremely limited and unpredictable – these small pressing run ’90s albums went out of print without warning and almost never came back. Once they were gone they were rarely ever reissued, although Simply Vinyl took a crack at filling that gap, with mixed results as I’m sure you know.

All of those factors conspire to make the cost of acquiring the mintiest pressings from overseas fairly high, and of course this is the main reason you have never seen the album on our site before. Be that as it may, we have this copy available and it is not only wonderful sounding but the music is every bit as good as I remember it.

You may remember that a controversy raged in the audiophile press at the time about how awful the CD sounded compared to the vinyl.  Turns out they had mastered the CD using some bad equipment, or a bad transfer of the tape, or some other such foolishness, and the result was that only us dinosaurs who had kept our turntables into the ’90s could actually stand to listen to the album. (more…)

A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night – The Video

 

For those of you who’ve never chanced upon it, here is the ‘live’ version of the album in five parts.

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Nilsson was apparently too far ahead of his time. Rod Stewart recently [2002, twenty years ago!] made an album of classic popular music that went to number one and jump-started his second career.

Harry Nilsson understands this music so much better and sings it so much better than Rod Stewart ever could that it’s hard to understand the relatively poor sales of this much superior album.

Either that or the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate Nilsson as much as I do. Probably both I guess. Too bad. This album is better than all the “also rans” albums put together. (McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom was truly unlistenable, but what person of taste can take any of these albums seriously?)

Arrangements by Gordon Jenkins add to the sublime character of the music. Jenkins arranged many of the greatest albums of this kind ever recorded, including top titles by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and perhaps most famously for us audiophiles, Nat King Cole (the Number One album Love Is the Thing and three others).

The original CD, by the way, is so bright and thin it will make your ears bleed. The new one may be better, but it’s doubtful. If you like Harry Nilsson and you don’t have a turntable, you are pretty much out of luck my friend.

Derek Taylor, Producer

About two years ago [circa 1971], Harry and I were talking about songs, swapping titles, and testing memories. You know that game? Who wrote ‘Miss Otis’ and what year did Al Jolson die, and what else besides ‘As Time Goes By’ did Herman Hupfeld … write? We found a lot of marvelous songs with fine words. And what melodies! ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It),’ ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.’ Brilliant stuff, constructed with style and flair. One day Harry suggested ‘Why don’t we do an album of the old songs?’ and it was the best idea I’d heard since God only knows when. ‘You produce and I’ll sing,’ he said. And two years later – it’s November 1972 – he says it again, and this time it’s on.

— Derek Taylor