Top Artists – Van Morrison

Van Morrison – Saint Dominic’s Preview

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from top to bottom, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage Green Label pressing
  • It’s unusual (to say the least) to find copies of Moondance or Astral Weeks that sound anything like the better copies of Saint Dominic’s Preview (or His Band and Street Choir, an equally good recording)
  • One of the better sounding Van Morrison albums, thanks to the superb engineering skills of Donn Landee at Wally Heider’s and elsewhere
  • 5 stars in Rolling Stone: “The coexistence of two styles on the same record turns out to be very refreshing; they complement each other by underscoring the remarkable versatility of Van’s musical imagination… the best-produced, most ambitious Van Morrison record yet released.”

We’ve been huge fans of this album for ages and don’t understand why it doesn’t get more respect. This is the album that comes right after Tupelo Honey and His Band And The Street Choir, so that should tell you something.

The piano has real weight, the bottom end is solid, and the brass sounds lively and rich, never squawky. (more…)

Van Morrison – Wavelength

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • This vintage pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in over four and a half years) boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • Richer, warmer and bigger than practically all of the other copies we played, here is the kind of analog smoothness that’s essential to the sound of Morrison’s music
  • His biggest selling album to date? Seems hard to believe but that’s what is says on Wikipedia – it went gold in 3 months
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • Time magazine raved: “Morrison has made two, maybe three albums that rank high among the finest of all rock ‘n’ roll. Wavelength is good enough to stand close by Morrison’s best work, a record of sinuous, sensuous magic. The man just can’t be beat.”

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Van Morrison – Avalon Sunset

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • Here is a vintage Polydor import pressing (one of only a handful of copies to ever hit the site) with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
  • Both of these sides give you the richness, Tubey Magic, clarity and resolution few copies can touch
  • “Van Morrison scored one of his biggest commercial successes with Avalon Sunset, a record highlighted by the gorgeous ‘Have I Told You Lately,’ one of his most heartfelt love songs and a major radio hit which helped introduce his music to a new generation of listeners.”

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Van Morrison – Moondance

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • An early Green Label pressing that was doing just about everything right, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Drop the needle anywhere on the album for a taste of early-70s Tubey Magical analog sound, not to mention the kind of blue-eyed soul that will remind some of you just how good music on vinyl used to be
  • A tough title to find in clean condition these days – most are covered in repeating marks – but not this one!
  • “An album worthy of an Irish R&B singer who wrote a teen hit called ‘Mystic Eyes’ (not to mention a Brill Building smash called ‘Brown Eyed Girl’), adding punchy brass (including pennywhistles and foghorn) and a solid backbeat (including congas) to his folk-jazz swing, and a pop-wise formal control to his Gaelic poetry.” Christgau – A+ (a grade he does not give out often)

Musically the record Moondance most reminds me of is After The Gold Rush. Neil Young set out to make a commercial album that had nothing but strong songs built around catchy melodies, using the highest quality production values. What better describes Moondance?

Every song is good, you can sing practically every one of them from memory, and in fact you’ll probably feel like singing along with every one of them as you are playing this very copy.

Van Morrison never made another album as good as this one, and After the Gold Rush is still Neil’s Masterpiece (along with Zuma, of course). If there are two records on the planet that belong in everybody’s collection, it’s these two.

Finding good sounding LPs of both of them is a tricky proposition — unless, of course, you are a customer of Better Records, where superb sounding pressings of Classic Rock Albums can be found all day every day.

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Van Morrison – His Band And Street Choir

More of the Music of Van Morrison

  • With very good Hot Stamper sound from first note to last, this vintage Green Label pressing of Van’s shockingly underrated album from 1970 will be hard to beat
  • It’s richer, fuller and with more presence than the average copy, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record buying public
  • The band is swinging, the material top-notch – “Domino,” “Crazy Face,” “Blue Money” and other classics are right here
  • The Best Sounding Van Morrison Album, a classic of 1970 Tubey Magical analog, and his only title to make our Top 100
  • “As ‘Domino’ opens the album with a show of strength, ‘Street Choir’ closes it with a burst of both musical and poetic energy which is not only better than anything else on the album but may well be one of Van’s two or three finest songs.” – Rolling Stone

This is the album that came out between Moondance (in the same year in fact, 1970) and Tupelo Honey, but for some reason, it don’t get no respect. We think that’s insane — the material on this album is stellar and the sound on the best pressings is out of this world!

Here’s a copy that really makes our case for us. Both sides of this vintage Warner Bros. pressing sound AMAZING! We went through a massive stack of copies and let me tell you — most of them sure don’t sound like this! Take this one home for some of the best Van Morrison sound you will ever hear.

For years I thought that Moondance was the best sounding album in the Van Morrison catalog. His Band And Street Choir is even better. One reason for that would have to be that Robert Ludwig mastered it, and he can usually be counted on to do an excellent job.

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Van Morrison – Veedon Fleece

More Van Morrison

  • Here is an original copy of Veedon Fleece (one of only a handful to hit the site in over four and a half years) with solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
  • Both of these sides are remarkably full-bodied, present and Tubey Magical with plenty of extension on both ends
  • This inspired collection reflects Morrison’s Irish roots, with Celtic, acoustic influences, and the same introspective quality found on Astral Weeks
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Veedon Fleece is every bit the creative equal of its more famous predecessors… If any album reflects a real period of transition for an artist, it’s this one. It’s brilliant.”

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On Our Top Copy of Moondance, How Did We Recognize that One Side Was Not as Tubey?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

We described our most recent shootout winning pressing this way:

A Moondance like you’ve never heard, with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this early Green Label pressing.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “silky and 3D and present”…”sweet and breathy vox”…”spacious and rich”…”huge and lively”…”jumping out of the speakers.”

Drop the needle anywhere on the album for a taste of early-70s Tubey Magical analog, not to mention the kind of blue-eyed soul that will remind some of you just how good music on vinyl used to be.

Side one was killer in every way, and the way we know that is we played a bunch of copies and nothing could beat it. This side one took top honors for having exactly the sound we described above.

Side two is another matter. We came across a side two that was slightly better than the side two you see here.

When we played the two best copies back to back, side one of this copy came out on top, earning a grade of 3+. However, the side two of another pressing showed us there was even more Tubey Magic in the recording than we’d noticed the first time around.

With another copy earning a better grade for having even more Tubey Magic, the full 3 pluses, we felt the right grade for this side two was 2.5+.

Helpful Advice

To aid you in doing your own evaluations, here is a list of records that we’ve found to be good for testing Tubey Magic.

This is exactly why we do shootouts. If you really want to be able to recognize subtle (and not so subtle!) differences between pressings, you must learn to do them too.

And make sure to take notes about what you are hearing, good and bad.

One more thing: stick with the Green Label early pressings, they are the only way to fly on Moondance.

Mistakes Were Made

If you made the mistake of buying the Rhino pressing of Moondance, I hope you heard what we heard: a complete lack of Tubey Magic! This on one of the most Tubey Magical analog recordings we’ve ever played. You can thank Kevin Gray for helping you flush your record money down the drain. When we first reviewed the remaster in 2014, we wrote:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we reviewed Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

We also complained that the Heavy Vinyl reissue gets the voice wrong.  When the voice is wrong on a Van Morrison record, you have yourself a completely worthless piece of vinyl. 180 grams or 120 grams or any other number of grams, vinyl with sound this bad should hold no appeal to the audiophile. The record collector, maybe, but collecting for the sake of collecting has never been our thing and we hope it’s never been yours.

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These Are the Kinds of Things You Say When You Haven’t Actually Played the Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

From the brain trust at Music Direct.

[Italics added by yours truly.]

Van Morrison’s Moondance is that rare rock album where the band has buffed the arrangements to pure perfection.

And now, you can experience it on the finest-sounding pressing that’s ever been made courtesy of this 180g LP, remastered at Acoustech from the original analog tapes by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman.

Practically every audiophile press outlet in the world has sung its praises. Moondance has never had such power.

The power to make me wonder how anyone in his right mind would release a record that sounds this bad, that power?

Then there’s this guy, 51nocaster:

As for Moondance, the reissue is very good, but I still prefer the original. Steve Hoffman was involved in mastering the Moondance reissue and like some of the DCC reissues, he seems to favor the lower mids over the upper mids.

As a rule that’s true about DCC records, his awful Creedence records being the best examples, but boy, that’s not what I heard on my copy. Just the opposite. Morrison’s voice on the new reissue has no lower mids. It’s all mids and upper mids.

I suspect a download on ITunes would be more tonally correct in the midrange.

In summary, please count us as one of the outlets not singing this record’s praises, which is why you can find it in our audiophile hall of shame, along with others that — in our opinion — qualify as some of the worst sounding records ever made.

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Moondance on Heavy Vinyl Is a Disgrace to Audiophiles and Record Lovers All Over the World

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Van Morrison Available Now

The original grade I gave out in 2015 when I last played this remastered version as part of a shootout was “D.” I explained at the time:

Just listen to how strange Van’s voice sounds, so lean, hard and sour. That alone qualifies it for an “F,” but considering how bad most pressings of this album are, let’s be fair, if not downright generous, and call it a “D.”

I just revisited the record in a current shootout, and after giving it some thought I have decided that the right grade is in fact “F.” It cannot be any other, for reasons I discuss below.

In 2014 I had written:

Where is the Tubey Magic of the originals? The sweetness? The richness? And why is there so little ambience or transparency? You just can’t “see” into the studio on this pressing the way you can on the good originals, but that’s fairly consistently been the knock on these remastered Heavy Vinyl records. We noted as much when we debunked Blue all the way back in early 2007, so no surprise there.

Having just played a marvelous shootout-winning early pressing, this time around I found the reproduction of Van’s voice on the reissue to be so leaned-out, artificial and unpleasant that I could hardly stand to listen to it.

We had reset the VTA correctly; the overall tonal balance of the recording from top to bottom was correct. It was only the voice that sounded so off. All the other shortcomings I had mentioned before were still true of course, but none of that mattered. The singer on this record just sounded awful.

As you know, we are constantly making improvements to our playback system. The real Moondance we had just played sounded better than ever. The fake Moondance, however, was sounding worse than ever. That’s what higher quality playback can do for you. It makes your good records sound better than they’ve ever sounded, and shows you just how bad your bad records really are.

Do I have a bad copy of the Heavy Vinyl pressing? Maybe, can’t say I don’t. If any of you out there in the real world have a copy of this pressing that you like, and would be willing to send it to me to hear for myself, I would be more than happy to give it a listen and report my findings on this blog.

Short of that I’m not sure what more I can do. I certainly do not feel the least bit inclined to waste a nickel of my hard-earned money on another copy of this ridiculously badly-mastered crap vinyl.

If you want to read about other records that have these same shortcomings, there are links below to the ones we’ve auditioned and identified to date. Our advice would be to avoid them, and if you own some of these pressings, perhaps now is the time to give them another listen and see if you don’t hear the same faults we did.

And, of course, the Hot Stamper pressings we offer, when played side by side with any of these Heavy Vinyl remasters, can help you to see more clearly just where these new records are going wrong, or, in the case of Moondance, completely off the rails.

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The Band – The Last Waltz

More of The Band

More Roots Rock LPs

  • The Last Waltz is back on the site for only the second time in about a year, here with roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on all SIX sides of these vintage Palm Tree pressings – just shy of our Shootout Winner (sides two and three actually won the shootout)
  • These sides are rich, dynamic and natural sounding, with low end weight, midrange smoothness and powerful, punchy bass
  • Features an A-list of brilliant artists, including Van Morrison, Ringo Star, Joni Mitchell, and Muddy Waters, just to name a few, and it’s surely the reason that this record is so hard to find and so expensive when you do find it
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “It’s the Band’s ‘special guests’ who really make this set stand out — Muddy Waters’ ferocious version of ‘Mannish Boy’ would have been a wonder from a man half his age, Van Morrison sounds positively joyous on ‘Caravan,’ Neil Young and Joni Mitchell do well for their Canadian brethren, and Bob Dylan’s closing set finds him in admirably loose and rollicking form.”
  • If you’re a fan of The Band, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this triple album from 1978 belongs in your collection

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