Focus-Rock, Pop and Soul

Here you will find rock, pop, soul, etc. albums we think we know well, having cleaned and played them by the score over the course of many decades.

There are currently more than 200 entries, but the number could easily exceed 1000 considering how many records we play every week in our shootouts. This is how we learn what we know, — because there is no other way.

Remembering the Glorious Sound of Tubes

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hall and Oates Available Now

This record has the sound of TUBES. I’m sure it was recorded with transistors, judging by the fact that it was made after most recording studios had abandoned that “antiquated” technology, but there may be a reason why they were able to achieve such success with the new transistor equipment when, in the decades to come, they would produce nothing but one failure after another.

In other words, I have a theory.

They remember what things sounded like when they had tubes. Modern engineers appear to have forgotten that sound. They seem to have no reference for Tubey Magic. If they use tubes in their mastering chains, they sure don’t sound the way vintage tube-mastered records tend to sound.

Transistor Audio Equipment with Plenty of Tubey Magic

A similar syndrome was then operating with the home audio equipment manufacturers as well. Early transistor gear by the likes of Marantz, McIntosh and Sherwood, just to name three I happen to be familiar with, still retained much of the smooth, rich, natural, sweet, grain-free sound of the better tube equipment of the day.

I once owned a wonderful Sherwood receiver that you would swear had tubes in it. In fact it was simply an unusually well-designed transistor unit. Anyone listening to it would never know that it was solid state. It has none of the “sound” we associate with solid state, thank goodness.

Very low power, 15 watts a channel. No wonder it sounded so good.

Stick with the 4 Digit Originals (SD 7269)

If you’re looking for a big production pop record that jumps out of your speakers, is full of TUBEY MAGIC, and has consistently good music, look no further. Until I picked up one of these nice originals, I had no idea how good this record could sound. For an early ’70s multi-track pop recording, this is about as good as it gets (AGAIG as we like to say). It’s rich, sweet, open, natural, smooth most of the time — in short, it’s got all the stuff we audiophiles LOVE.   

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Listening for Energy and Rock and Roll Firepower on Bad Company’s Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock Classics Available Now

The drums on this album are so solid, punchy and present, they put to shame 99% of the rock records on the planet.

As well as having great drums, the overall sound of the best pressings is raw, real and wonderfully unprocessed.

Here you will find none of the glossy artificiality you might hear on many of the rock and pop records we sell.

There’s nothing wrong with that sound, mind you, but this recording captures much more of what the real instruments sound like in the studio.

And, if you’re playing this album good and loud, you’ll feel like you’re in the room with the boys as they kick out the jams. “Ready For Love” sounds great here — shocking clarity, tons of ambience, and silky sweet highs.

This album was one of Ron Nevison‘s early engineering jobs.

The year before (1973) he had been behind the board at Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio for Quadrophenia, one of the best sounding Who albums we know of, and a longtime member of our Top 100 (as is this album).

He also knocked it out of the park on Bad Company’s follow-up, 1975’s Straight Shooter.

He worked on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffiti the same year.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.

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The Who By Numbers – How Did We Know Side Two Was Slightly Veiled?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Here is how we might typically describe one of our Shootout Winning copies:

Who By Numbers returns to the site for only the second time in over three years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage Polydor import pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too.

Glyn Johns‘s magic is on display here, with open mics in a big studio space creating the 3D soundscapes we love.

Features two of their most iconic songs, “Slip Kid” and “Squeezebox,” and both sound incredible on this copy.

To back it all up, here are the notes for that very copy.

We started playing track three on side one, Squeeze Box, and returned to that track when we had two top copies to play against each other in the final round. Which one won? The one with “the most body and tubes.”

Note that side two of this copy was slightly veiled compared to the side two of the best copy we played, the one that would go on to earn 3+.

We don’t like veiled records — records where there is a curtain, no matter how transparent, in front of the musicians. Heavy Vinyl pressings are typically quite veiled and recessed in the midrange compared to their vintage vinyl counterparts, and that sound is simply not going to cut it with us. (Other folks may prefer a different sound it seems.)

Midrange presence is one of the most important qualities of any rock or pop recording we evaluate. You want Roger Daltry to be front and center, neither recessed nor behind a veil.

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One of The Most Tubey Magical Rock Recordings of All Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the 70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, Yes, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and too many others to list.

It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted. (Of course, as it turns out, recording technology only got worse as the decade wore on, and during the 80s the sound of most recordings went off the proverbial cliff.)

Big Production British Rock just doesn’t get much better than A Space in Time.

Just listen to the guitar solo on Let The Sky Fall. It comes complete with layer upon layer of guitars, acoustic and electric, with some backwards guitar thrown in for good measure. And that’s just the guitar parts. This kind of dense aural soundscape, presented with so many carefully placed elements from side to side and front to back, makes repeated listenings especially rewarding.

No matter how many times you play the album, you are likely to hear (and hopefully appreciate) something new in the mix. I’ve been playing ASIT for forty fifty years (bought my copy when I was still in high school) and I heard lots of things this time around I never knew were there. This is why we keep improving our systems, right? There is never going to be a time when these nearly forty more than fifty year old recordings have nothing new to offer.

Their Only Essential Album

By the way, this was the first Ten Years After record I bought, and I liked it so much I went out and bought many of their other albums, only to find that none of those albums are anything like this one. None of them sound particularly good; none of them are particularly well produced; and, worst of all, most of the music is fairly forgettable British Blues Rock.

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How Good Are the UK Original Unboxed Deccas of Satanic Majesties?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

How good are the original Unboxed Deccas on Satanic Majesties?

They can be very good.

But they are never as good as the right later pressings with the Decca in a box label, the ones produced from about 1970 on.

The Unboxed Decca pressing earned a Super Hot Stamper grade (A++). The later pressing, with the right stamper, showed us just how good the album can sound.

Since the originals are pricey and hard to find, and, as a rule, noisier than the later pressings, we don’t pick them up unless we find them for cheap, which rarely happens. They have not won any shootouts, and that is very unlikely to change.

There is one set of stampers for this album that always wins, and those stampers are not found on the early label.

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The Association Greatest Hits – Gold, Green or Palm Tree?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written way back in 2008. It appears to confirm much of the conventional wisdom we criticize when it comes to records and the sonic qualities of their various pressings, but sometimes the conventional wisdom turns out to be right.

Not just sometimes, but most of the time. That’s why rules of thumb seem to work more often than not.

It’s all the times that they don’t work that are the problem, the exceptions to the rule, especially if one of those exceptions just happens to be a favorite album of yours.

Then you’re really up a creek. You followed a general rule that sometimes works and sometimes fails and now you really don’t know of any other way to solve the problem. Fortunately for readers of this blog, we do.

For more on The Association, please click here.

The sound on this record is as good as this album gets. Don’t think you’re too cool to enjoy this 60s pop rock. These songs are still a blast and very enjoyable. The sound on this record is as good as this album gets. 

I did a shootout with this copy and a later pressing just now, after having just listed a Gold Label Original LP of Insight Out, which allowed me to compare the sound of three different generations of Warner Brothers records.

I heard pretty much what you would expect to hear. The best Gold Label pressings have the most sweetness, richness, the best bass (amazingly good for a ’60s pop recording) and the most Tubey Magic.

The Green Label Greatest Hits sounds very sweet and analog, but it’s obviously made from sub-generation copy tapes, as Greatest Hits albums usually are. Still the sound is very smooth and sweet. There is a loss of transparency but the tonality is correct.

The Palm Tree Label pressing, the best sounding one I’ve ever heard by the way, is brighter and more modern sounding. On some tracks that brightness helps cut through the murk, but most of the time it sounds more transistory and less musical.

So this Green Label copy has the best sound for all the hits. If you want better sound, you have to find the right pressings of the individual albums. Since most of those are full of filler, this is actually a pretty good way to go.

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Which Album by The Who Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

We think Tommy has the best Who sound.

I don’t know of another Who album with such consistently good sound — song to song, not copy to copy of course. Just about every song on here can sound wonderful on the right UK pressing.

If you’re lucky enough to get hold of a killer copy, you’re going to be blown away by the Tubey Magical guitars, the rock-solid bottom end, the jumpin’-out-of-the-speakers presence and dynamics, and the silky vocals and top end.

Usually the best we can give you for The Who is big and rockin’ (Who’s Next, Live at Leeds), but on Tommy, we can give you 60s analog magic you will rarely find in the decades to follow.

Killer Acoustic Guitars

Acoustic guitar reproduction is key to this recording, and on the best copies the harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard in every strum.

What do high grades give you for this album? Silky, sweet vocals; huge weight to the bottom end; “you are there” immediacy; BIG drums, off the charts rock and roll energy, and shocking clarity and transparency.

No other Who album in our experience has all these things in such abundance.

The Tubey Magic Top Ten

You don’t need tube equipment to hear the prodigious amount of Tubey Magic that exists on this recording. For those of you who’ve experienced top quality analog pressings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon, or practically any jazz album on Contemporary, whether played through tubes or transistors, that’s the luscious sound of Tubey Magic, and it is all over Tommy.

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Mobile Fidelity Actually Produced a New and Improved Deja Vu in 1983

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

A letter came to us years ago with the comment “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

As the time I made some of the following comments in reply and have added a few new ones since then.

Deja Vu is indeed a very special album, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, playing over and over on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

13 Years Go By

Time went by and then, oddly enough, my love for the music was reignited by a pressing that came out 13 years after the album’s first release, on a label you may be familiar with, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs.

I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound.

This is not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are, but let us give credit where credit is due. With the volume cranked good and loud,  I often played the first track, Carry On, using the MoFi pressing to demonstrate how smooth, rich, big, powerful and dynamic my system could sound.

“The CD may be taking over the world,” I would say, because by 1983 that was exactly what was happening, “but you”ll never hear a CD that sounds like this!”

13 More Years Go By

It would take me many years, at least another 13 or so, to come across the domestic reissues that trounced the MoFi and showed me how colored, compressed, thick, blurry and recessed their pressing was.

Here is the real shocker from that time: I actually thought that the extremely hard-to-find reissue I’d discovered was so flukishly good that it could never be beaten by any other pressing!

(To be fair, my long-time audiophile buddy Robert Pincus probaby deserves the credit for finding it. He found a great many special pressings for me back when I was buying records from him, reaching all the way back to 1987.)

Which is yet another example of everything being relative. I admit I had a poor understanding of that vitally important concept at the time. I really had no idea how good a recording Deja Vu was, and I didn’t really have a way to find out because many of the most important revolutions in audio had not been incorporated into my system, or had yet to be invented.

Within the last five years or so another domestic pressing, and now most recently an import (!), have come to be seen as clearly superior to all of these.

This is the result of having never given up the search for a better Deja Vu.

Record Collecting in My World

Anticipating the release of the newest Half-Speed remastered pressing that would deliver me from the evils of the garden-variety domestic or import LP I happened to own was the dominant feature of my record collecting world in the 70s and 80s.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to learn that almost none of those “new and improved” pressings would pass the test of time. This is an idea I first came to appreciate in the 90s and one that has become more true with each passing year.

With the increasing proliferation of one Heavy Vinyl mediocrity after another, in 2007 we finally recognized we had a duty to our customers to stand athwart audio history and yell “Stop.”

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English Settlement – A Sonic Tour de Force

More of the Music of XTC

This is an AMAZINGLY well-recorded album, with huge amounts of open studio space and that Tubey Magical, rich, fat, dense British Rock Sound. That sound isn’t easy to reproduce, but this copy absolutely nails it. Nothing else in our shootout came close to it!

If you have big speakers and the room to play them, this is quite the sonic tour de force. Credit Hugh Padgham, producer and engineer, who’s worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Police, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Those bands make the kind of music that make good use of Padgham trademark sound: wall-to-wall, deep, layered, smooth, rich and stuffed to the gills. XTC with Padgham’s help have here produced a real steamroller of an album in English Settlement.

The big hit on this album is one that most audiophiles will probably know: Senses Working Overtime. Even over the radio you can hear how dense the production is. Imagine what it sounds like on an original British pressing with Hot Stampers, played on a modern audiophile rig. We can tell you: IT ROCKS. (more…)

Taking Tiger Mountain – Peak Art Rock

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brian Eno Available Now

This is Brian Eno’s Masterpiece as well as a personal favorite of yours truly.

On the right pressing, Taking Tiger Mountain is a twisted pop Big Speaker Demo Disc like nothing you have ever heard.

If you have a big speaker and the kind of high quality playback that is capable of unraveling the most complicated studio creations, with all the weight and power of live music at practically live levels, this is the record that will make all your audio effort and expense worthwhile.

That’s the kind of stereo I’ve been working on for forty fifty years and this album just plain KILLS over here.

Art Rock

That being said, it may not be the kind of thing most music loving audiophiles will be able to make sense of if they have no history with this kind of arty rock from the 70s. I grew up on Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Ambrosia, Supertramp, Yes and the like, bands that wanted to play rock music but felt shackled by the chains of the conventional pop song.

This was and still is my favorite kind of music. Experts who study these things say that the music you discover between the ages of 17 and 23 stays with you for your entire life. For me that’s the music I fell in love from 1971 to 1977. I was 20 when this album came out.

When it comes to the genre, I put this album right at the top of the heap, along with several other landmark albums from the period: More Songs About Buildings and Food, Siren, The Original Soundtrack, Crisis? What Crisis?, Ambrosia’s first two releases, The Yes Album, 801 Live, A New World Order and plenty of others, many more than I have room to describe here.

It should be noted that most of these album don’t sell all that well. We do shootouts for them anyway, partly in the hopes that at least some of our more adventurous customers will get turned on to this music and have their lives changed in the same way mine was.

One difference I could be forgiven for pointing to in this regard is that I had available to me random copies of unknown quality, unlike our customers who get offered nothing but great sounding pressings.

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