Two songs in particular make this a Must Own album: Scarborough Fair and The Fool On The Hill. Both of them are given wonderfully original treatments. These songs hold their own against the originals, and that’s saying something.
Sergio took on many of the heavyweights of his day, and most of the time he succeeded in producing a uniquely satisfying version of well-known material. Superb original tracks by The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell and others were given the Sergio Mendes latin pop treatment and came out much the better for it.
Those of you who have purchased some of their CDs may have noted that they do not sound particularly good, as though little are or effort was expended in their mastering, which is no doubt the case. Almost any good original brown label A&M pressing will be dramatically better.
Fool on the Hill (like all Sergio Mendes albums) is a difficult record to reproduce. Do not attempt to play it using anything other than the highest quality equipment.
Unless your system is firing on all cylinders, even our hottest Hot Stamper copies — the Super Hot and White Hot pressings with the biggest, most dynamic, clearest, and least distorted sound — can have problems. Your system should be thoroughly warmed up, your electricity should be clean and cooking, you’ve got to be using the right room treatments, and we also highly recommend using a demagnetizer such as the Walker Talisman on the record, your cables (power, interconnect and speaker) as well as the individual drivers of your speakers.
This is a record that’s going to demand a lot from the listener, and we want to make sure that you feel you’re up to the challenge. If you don’t mind putting in a little hard work, here’s a record that will reward your time and effort many times over, and probably teach you a thing or two about tweaking your gear in the process (especially your VTA adjustment, just to pick an obvious area many audiophiles neglect).
The soundfield has a three-dimensional quality that was nonexistent on some of the other copies we played. Drop the needle on “Many Rivers To Cross” and check out the amazing sound of the organ coming from the back of the room. Only the highest resolution copies give you that kind of soundstage depth.
The piano sounds natural and weighty. The fiddle on “The Sweetest Gift” (played by our man David Lindley) is full of rosiny texture.
Emmylou Harris, dueting here with Linda, sings beautifully throughout.
All in all, you will find truly Demo Disc Quality sound on the best copies.
The acoustic guitars are tonally right on the money, neither bright nor dull, with transient information that is captured perfectly as long as the pressing itself is not smeary, which the better Hot Stamper pressings won’t be.
Listen to the opening guitar in the right channel of “The Sweetest Gift”; we used it as a test track and when that guitar is right there you know you have a copy with Hot Stampers.
This is a TOUGH album to find with great sound and quiet vinyl but when you come across an excellent copy like this, the record is a MONSTER. The track list includes some of the best McCartney songs of the seventies: the title song, “Jet,” “Bluebird,” “Mrs. Vandebilt,” “Let Me Roll It,” “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” (my personal favorite on the album) — there’s really not a dog in the bunch.
This is clearly the last consistently good studio album the man recorded.
So many copies we play are either murky or a bit edgy, and it takes a very special copy to strike the ideal tonal balance that will allow all the songs to sound their best.
This original UK Capitol 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. (more…)
When it works, boy can this album sound amazing. Full of Tubey Magic, not to mention analog warmth and sweetness, this is clearly one of the band’s best albums of the 70s.
What’s magical about The Beach Boys? Their voices of course, what else could it be? It’s not a trick question. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no practical value whatsoever. A Beach Boys record with bad sound in the midrange — like most of them — is to us a worthless record.
Mirage is a surprisingly good album if you can find the right copy.
The mids and highs can be really silky and sweet. The whole album has a glossy sound, clearly the influence of Lindsay Buckingham and his production team. The sound of Fleetwood Mac in this period is their doing, and with a phenomenal run of success that’s rarely been seen in pop history, it’s hard to argue with either their approach to the material or the sound. It strikes us that they used every track on the multi-track recorder and then some. (more…)
As you may have noticed, we here at Better Records are HUGE Sergio Mendes fans. Nowhere else in the world of music can you find the wonderfully diverse thrills that this group offers. We go CRAZY for the girls’ breathy multi-tracked vocals and the layers and layers of harmonies, the brilliant percussion, and, let us never forget, the crucially important, always tasteful keyboards and arrangements of Sergio himself.
Most copies of Look Around are grainy, shrill, thin, veiled, smeary and full of compressor distortion in the loudest parts. Clearly, this is not a recipe for audiophile listening pleasure.
Our Hot Stamper pressings are the ones that are as far from that kind of sound as we can find them. We’re looking for the records that have none of those bad qualities. I’m happy to report that we have managed to find some awfully good sounding copies for our Hot Stamper customers. (more…)
If you like Michael McDonald, Toto, The Doobies, Hall and Oates, The Bee Gees and countless other bands we have lovingly found a home for on our site, you will no doubt find much to like here. A guilty pleasure, you say? When a record sounds this good there is nothing to feel guilty about.
Besides Michael McDonald‘s amazing background vocals, listen for the contribution Michael Omartian (the producer) makes on the keyboards. The keyboards more than the guitars are really the driving force behind these songs. If you hear some Aja in his playing, that’s because he played on Aja too. He was also instrumental in many of the Direct to Discs Sheffield made, I’ve Got the Music in Me probably being the best known of the batch.
