Asylum – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “Un******believable that any record could sound that good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

I want to tell you I bought America’s 1st LP from you some couple of years back. White Hot designation at that time. I don’t know if you have found one better since then.

Paid big dollars and I still cannot believe the sound. Worth every penny. 

When I play that LP, I cannot avoid getting goose bumps or getting totally enveloped with the music. The guitars and vocals are flat out surreal.

It is just as amazing as the Eagles 1st LP Hot Stamper. Un******believable that any record could sound that good.

Bill 

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I know exactly what you mean. In 1971 or 1972 I got my first copy of America and it quickly became a record I could not get enough of.

I didn’t discover how hot the first Eagles album could sound until about 2000. That’s how long it took me to stumble upon the original white label Asylum pressing.

Before then all I had heard were the blue label reissues, and most of those are unimpressive to say the least.

Since then we have written in some depth about the album, which you can read all about here if so inclined.

(more…)

Rockin’ Out to Victim of Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This commentary was written more than ten years ago. Wouldn’t change a thing though!

Victim of Love is a classic case of yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you turn up your volume.

It’s the sound of this five piece tearing it up LIVE IN THE STUDIO. It’s also the track where the DCC just falls apart for us. Where did the rock and roll energy go? The DCC makes it sound like the band just doesn’t care, which was certainly not our experience when we were playing any of the killer Hot Stampers we came across.

Just the reverse was true; we had them turned up full blast and they ROCKED.

One reason the turn up your volume test is such a great test — in this case, the problem being the kind of lifeless sound that Heavy Vinyl pressings more often than not suffer from — the harder it is to ignore.

I might go so far as to say that Victim of Love is the best sounding track on the whole album. It’s punchy, real and MUSICAL in a way that nothing else on the album is, because it’s being played by a real band, live. The energy and coherency of the sound is like nothing else you will hear on Hotel California, and possibly on any other Eagles record. (more…)

The Absolute Sound Was Half Right about Desperado

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

As we all know, the best sound on an Eagles record is found on the first album. For whatever reason, that record was left off the TAS Super Disc list, even though we feel that sonically it beats this one by a bit, and musically it beats it by a mile.

On the TAS Super Disc list, Harry Pearson recommends the British SYL pressings for this album. SYL pressings can sound very good; we’ve previously found one that rated a Double Plus on both sides.

But our champions for both sides were domestic, both this time and last time.

Does that mean the best domestics will always beat the best SYL pressings? Not at all. Only critical listening can separate the better pressings from the more typical ones. After playing more than a dozen copies of this album this week, we can definitively tell you that there are FAR more mediocre copies of this record — both domestic and import — than truly exceptional ones.

The typical pressing of this album, whether the domestic or SYL, falls far short of belonging on a Super Disc List.

There are killer domestic copies AND killer SYL imports out there, and the only way to know which ones sound good is to collect ’em, clean ’em, and play ’em.

Remember: TAS List doesn’t guarantee great sound, but Better Records does.

If you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve stated, we’ll always happily take that record back and refund your money. Good luck getting ol’ Harry to send you a check when the TAS-approved pressings you pick up don’t deliver.

Want to find your own killer copy?

(more…)

The Real Eagles Sound Comes From the Real Eagles Master Tape

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This commentary may be roughly twenty years old, but we think it holds up just fine.

At one time this was my single favorite Demo Disc.

A customer who bought one of these once told me it was the best sounding record he had ever heard in his life. I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s certainly as good as any rock record I have ever heard, and I’ve heard an awful lot of very good ones.

There’s an interesting story behind this album, which I won’t belabor here. One listen to a later reissue or Heavy Vinyl pressing or Greatest Hits and you’ll know I speak the truth when I say that the tape used to cut this pressing was never used again to cut another.

It is GONE. LOST FOREVER. Most copies of this album are mediocre at best, and positively painful to listen to once you’ve heard the right pressing, the one cut from the real tape.

Which mostly explains why I never had any respect for this first album. The average copy sounds so bad that the musical values just aren’t communicated to the listener. Isn’t this why we have all this fancy equipment in the first place, to allow the musicians to communicate with us the way they intended? And when the record is a poor reproduction of the artist’s work, it prevents this communication from taking place. (And don’t get me started about CDs.)

Accidental Discoveries

Those poor reproductions are probably the ones you have, if you even have a copy of the album at all. I’ve been buying Eagles records for more than 30 40 years and I only discovered my first hot stamper pressing around 2001. Of course I found it entirely by accident, with no inkling beforehand that the album could possibly sound remotely as good as that amazing copy was sounding all those years ago. I played Train Leaves Here This Morning for anyone who wanted to hear the system at its best (back when I had the monstrous Whisper system in my living room).

Before that I had heard a number of flat sounding versions and concluded, as most audiophiles would, that the album must be poorly recorded. I stopped thinking like that soon after, which is one of the main reasons you can find amazing sounding pressings of albums on our site that aren’t supposed to sound any good. (Do a quick Google search and see if any audiophile has anything good to say about the album. We came up empty-handed.)

If you own one of those bad later pressings, it’s a record you might have played once or twice, gotten little out of, and put it back on the shelf, wondering why those stupid Eagles couldn’t get their act together and record their music better.

But they did! They were recorded brilliantly. Glyn Johns, the recording engineer, is a genius. The sound is smooth, rich, sweet and Tubey Magical beyond belief.

I would say it’s as good a pop/rock recording as any I have ever heard, and better than 99.99% of the competition.

(more…)

Even Shootouts Won’t Teach You What You Can Learn from Variations in Your Table Setup

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Joni Mitchell Available Now

As anyone familiar with album knows, Court and Spark has loud vocal choruses on a number of tracks. More often than not, during the loudest sections they sound like they are either breaking up or threatening to. This quality of “almost breaking up” is most easily heard on Down to You.

I always assumed it was compressor or board overload. But on the best of the best copies there doesn’t seem to be any breakup — the voices get loud and stay clean throughout.

Which means that instead of being on the master tape, it might be compressor distortion that is occurring during the mastering.

Regardless of the source of the distortion, or lack thereof, the loudest choruses are a tough test for any system.

Setup Advice

If you have one of our hottest Hot Stampers, try adjusting your setup — VTA, Tracking Weight, Azimuth, Anti-Skate — Especially! Audiophiles often overlook this one, at their peril — and note how cleanly the loudest passages play using various combinations of settings.

Keep a yellow pad handy and write everything down step by step as you make your changes, along with what differences you hear in the sound.

You will learn more about sound from this exercise than you can from practically any other. Even shootouts won’t teach you what you can learn from variations in your table setup.

And once you have your setup dialed in better, you will find that your shootouts go a lot smoother than they used to.

(more…)

Listening in Depth to Desperado

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.

This is the second-best sounding Eagles record of all time, no doubt thanks to the engineering of our man Glyn Johns.

In case you don’t know, the best sound on any Eagles record is found on the first album.

It’s a Top Ten rock and pop title and as Tubey Magical a rock record as you will ever hear.

A True Super Disc (Second Only to the First Album in that Respect)

Of course, the best sound on an Eagles record is found on the first album. For whatever reason, that record was left off the TAS super disc list, even though we feel that both musically and sonically it beats this one by a bit.

On the TAS Super Disc list, Harry Pearson recommends the British SYL pressings for this album. SYL pressings can sound very good; in fact, one of the top copies from our most recent shootout was SYL. A bit of a surprise since our champion for both sides during the last shootout was domestic.

Does that mean the best domestics will always beat the best SYL pressings? Not at all. Only critical listening can separate the superb pressings from the typical ones. After playing more than a dozen copies of this album this week, we can definitively tell you that there are far more mediocre copies of this record — both domestic and import — than truly exceptional ones. The typical pressing of this album, whether the domestic or SYL, falls far short of belonging on a Super disc list.

There are killer domestic copies and killer SYL imports out there, and the only way to know which ones sound good is to collect ’em, clean ’em, and play ’em. Remember: TAS list doesn’t guarantee great sound, but Better Records does — if you don’t think a record sounds as good as we’ve stated, we’ll always happily take that record back and refund your money. Good luck getting ol’ Harry to send you a check when the TAS-approved pressings you pick up don’t deliver.

Side One

Doolin-Dalton

This wonderful song is a great test track for side one. Typical pressings of this album tend to be dark and lack extension up top. When you have no real top end, space, detail and resolution suffer greatly. You need to be able to appreciate each of the stringed instruments being played — guitar, banjo, dobro — and the top end needs to be extended and correct for you to do that. (more…)

These Stampers Consistently Come in Last in Our Shootouts

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

All the original domestic pressings are cut by Ted Jensen at Sterling as far as we know.

You can find TJ and STERLING on every last one of them (with the notable exception of the SRC pressings, best avoided). What you can’t find is good sound on every last one of them.

The most common stampers can be found from pressing plants using the following label designations: MON, PRC, PRCW, AR and SP.

In our experience, two of the five labels listed above have the potential to win shootouts. Two of the others tend to end up somewhere in the middle of the grading curve. One consistently ends up at the bottom.

It’s important to keep in mind that in our shootouts, the person hearing the copy being played, the one who is carefully noting its strengths and weaknesses, has no idea what pressing plant actually produced the record, or what its specific stampers numbers might be.

That kind of  information is compiled after the grading has been done. That’s when these patterns emerge.

The domestic pressings with the stampers shown above have not done well in our shootouts for years now. If you own a copy with these stampers, or ones like them, the good news is that we can get you a much better sounding copy of The Long Run than you have ever heard. It won’t be cheap, but we guarantee that it will be very, very good.

Stamper numbers are not the be-all and end-all in the world of records, but after hearing too many copies with these stampers and less than stellar sound, from now on we are going to focus our attention on the stampers that do well and leave copies with these markings sitting in the bins.

Stampers

That the stampers are entirely responsible for the quality of any given record’s sound is a mistaken idea, and a rather convenient one when you stop to think about it. Audiophiles, like most everybody else on this planet, want answers, the simpler the better. Easier to memorize that way.

(more…)

Something Phony This Way Comes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now

Here’s what we learned from a shootout many years ago.

Some copies sounded like they were Half-Speed mastered by Mobile Fidelity.

(This is not a compliment. We hate that label’s phony sound and we don’t know why so many audiophiles would want to put up with the colorations MFSL’s records were notorious for.)

  • They had a little something phony added to the top of Linda’s voice.
  • They had a little bit of suckout right in the middle of the midrange, the middle of her voice, and
  • They had a somewhat diffuse, vague quality, with sound that lacked the solidity we heard on the best pressings.

These hi-fi-ish qualities that we heard on so many copies reminded us of the kind of audiophile sound we decry at every turn. We’ve played literally hundreds and hundreds of MoFi’s and other Half-Speed mastered records over the course of the last forty plus years, and one thing we know well is what they sound like.

But think about it. What if you only had one copy of the album — why would you have more than one anyway? — and it had that Half-Speed sound?

You would simply accept that the recording obviously had those qualities. (This assumes you could be expected to recognize them in the first place.)

Let’s face it, most audiophiles can’t, or all these companies would have gone out of business and stayed out of business, and their out of print records would sell for peanuts, not the collector prices they bring on ebay and audiophile web sites.

(more…)

Ranking The First Seven Albums by The Eagles

More of the Music of The Eagles

Without question the first Eagles album is still their best sounding release.

Hotel California is a classic, no argument there, but even the best sounding copies are a little “modern” for our tastes. I prefer both the music and the sound of On The Border to Hotel CA, but that should clearly be seen as a minority opinion. De gustibus and all that.

Let’s call them their second and third best, we’ll leave the order to you.

The third tier would have One of These Nights, followed by Desperado, The Long Run and Eagles Live.

The less said about any of their albums after 1980 the better.

You know the first album. You know Hotel California. The best Eagles album you don’t know is On The Border.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. On the Border is a good example of a record most audiophiles don’t know well but would most likely benefit from getting to know it better.

(more…)

Andrew Gold’s Debut – A Fab Favorite from the Day I Bought Mine in 1975

More of the Music of Andrew Gold

Hot Stamper Pressings on the Asylum Label

Andrew Gold’s debut is a good example of a record most audiophiles have never heard. The more open-minded among you — especially those who love a well-crafted pop song with Demo Disc sonics — might really benefit from giving it a chance, the way I did all the way back in 1975. I read the Rolling Stone review and went right down to my Tower Records and picked up a copy, and boy am I glad I did. I’ve played this album many hundreds of times and never tired of it.

If you know the “Asylum Sound” — think of the Tubey Magical analog of The Eagles’ first album and you won’t be far off — you can be sure the best copies of Andrew Gold’s first three albums on Asylum have plenty of it.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

The guitars on this record are a true test of reproduction quality. Most of the pressings of this record do not get the guitars to sound right. And when the guitars are perfection, the voices and all the other instruments tend to be right as well.

Let’s face it: they just don’t know how to make acoustic guitars sound like this anymore. You have to go back to nearly 50-year-old records like this one to find that sound.

(more…)