Top Artists – Linda Ronstadt

Something Phony This Way Comes

More of the Music of Linda Ronstadt

Hot Stamper Pressings on the Asylum Label

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

Many copies sounded like they were half-speed mastered.

  • 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 twenty 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, assuming you could even 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.

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Linda Ronstadt – Prisoner In Disguise

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    • Prisoner In Disguise returns to the site for the first time in over two years, here with Linda’s trademark punchy, lively Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides of this vintage Asylum pressing
    • Here are just a few of our notes for this killer copy: “silky and breathy vox,” “big and punchy,” “huge, rich and silky,” “tons of space and detail,” “so tubey.”
    • This is an amazing recording, but it takes a special copy like this one to reveal all the magic that we know had to have been on the tape in 1975, almost fifty years ago
    • 4 1/2 stars – “Love Is a Rose,” “Tracks of My Tears” and “Heat Wave” were hits, but Linda really pours her heart into “Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox”
    • Andrew Gold (so critical to the success of HLAW) is still heavily involved, along with EmmyLou Harris, James Taylor, Lowell George, David Lindley, JD Souther, and of course Peter Asher

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.

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Linda Ronstadt – What’s New

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  • Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard What’s New sound this good
  • So hugely spacious and three-dimensional, yet with a tonally correct and fairly natural sounding Linda, this is the way to hear it
  • What engineer George Massenburg gets right is the sound of an orchestra, augmented with jazz musicians (Ray Brown, Tommy Tedesco, Plas Johnson, Bob Cooper), all performing live in a huge studio
  • “…the best and most serious attempt to rehabilitate an idea of pop that Beatlemania… undid in the mid-60s.”
  • If you’re a Ronstadt fan, this title from 1983 is surely a Must Own. The complete list of titles from 1983 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

With two outstanding sides, this pressing gets two critically important elements of the recording right:

The strings in the orchestra, and, for obvious reasons, even more importantly, Linda’s voice.

We guarantee that these sides give you a more natural sounding Linda than you’ve ever heard, or your money back.

If all you own is an mediocre sounding pressing or the truly awful Mobile Fidelity from 1983, you are in for a world of better sound with this very record.

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Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris – Trio

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  • This original Warner Bros. pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in nearly three years) boasts solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • Big, rich, smooth, and sweet (particularly on side two), how did George Massenburg pull off this kind of analog sound in 1987?
  • We don’t know, but we do know good sound when we hear it, and we heard remarkably good sound on this side two, with side one not far behind
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…that rare example of an all-star collaborative effort that truly shows everyone involved to their best advantage, and it ranks with the best of all three headliners’ work.”

With three brilliant and accomplished singers harmonizing in the studio you can imagine that faultless midrange tonality is key to the best copies, and you would be right.

Some copies had the girls’ sounding a bit dark and veiled. Some had them a bit thin and bright. The Goldilocks Principle comes into play here as it does in so many of our shootouts: the best copies find the right balance of richness and clarity. (more…)

Linda Ronstadt – Take Our Advice and Skip the Originals

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Hot Stamper Pressings of Folk Rock Records Available Now

The originals from 1967 have never impressed us much. Click on the links below for more records that sound best to us on the right reissue pressing 

Here are some currently available Hot Stamper pressings that we think sound their best on the right reissue (the ones we sell, obviously; there are plenty of reissues that don’t have good sound, but the ones we offer handily beat the originals we’ve — and no doubt you’ve — heard).

Here are all the titles we’ve reviewed to date that have the potential to sound their best on the right reissue

On this album the sound varies quite a bit from track to track.

The best tracks are rich, tubey and clear; the worst thin, bright and hard. Some What to Listen For advice follows.

If you are interested in digging deeper, our Listening in Depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done multiple shootouts for.

The first track on side one rarely stayed clean when loud, but here for the most part it does. It’s a good test for whether or not you have a copy with high quality, low distortion mastering. Listen for the least amount of smear and congestion and the most resolution.

The second track is richer and tubier – it proves that side one is mastered correctly.

On side two the first track is rough, the second track better, the third richer, sweeter and smoother still.

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Linda Ronstadt – Rockin’ Out to Simple Dreams

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Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Linda Ronstadt

Clearly this is one of Linda’s best albums, and I would have to say, based on my fairly extensive experience with her recorded output, that it is in fact THE BEST SOUNDING record she ever made.

I love Heart Like a Wheel, but it sure doesn’t sound like this, not even on the Triple Plus copies that win our shootouts. (Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.)

I confess to having never taken the album seriously, dismissing it as a commercial collection of pop hits with about as much depth as the L.A. River — but I was wrong wrong WRONG.

This is a great sounding album on the right pressing, not the compressed piece of grainy cardboard we’ve all been playing for years, unaware of the tremendous sound quality lurking in the grooves of other copies, the ones that were blessed with the right stampers, the right vinyl and a healthy amount of fairy dust wafting over the press that day.

That’s what Hot Stamper shootouts are all about — finding those copies, the ones no one knows exist.

This Is a Real Band

Until a Hot Stamper found its way onto our turntable, we had absolutely no idea the album could sound like this, or that the music was so good.

The first thing that came to mind when I looked inside the fold open cover and saw all the guys who back Linda up on the album is that this is a real rock band. These are not a bunch of studio cats punching a time card. These guys are a band, and they know how to ROCK; just listen to the way they come blasting out of the gate on It’s So Easy. Linda is with them all the way, giving one of the best performances of her career.

Song after song, this super-tight band with the hot female lead (!) show that they can rock with the best of them. And do beautiful ballads (Blue Bayou) too.

Folks, I hereby testify that a Hot Stamper copy of this very album gave me a newfound respect for Linda beyond her work on Heart Like a Wheel. This is the album that shows she can do it all, as the All Music Guide points out, and I’m a believer.

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Linda Ronstadt – For Sentimental Reasons

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  • An incredible copy of Ronstadt’s 1986 release with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to last
  • Linda is fuller, sweeter, breathier, less spitty (some tracks more than others) and just plain less artificial here than on all other copies we played in our recent shootout
  • The final installment of the jazz trilogy that Ronstadt recorded with bandleader and arranger Nelson Riddle
  • “… it is in the hushed intensity of Mr. Riddle’s string arrangements for the album’s ballads that one senses a musician reaching deeply into his soul to make eloquent final statements… The arrangements’ emotional gravity reverberates in Miss Ronstadt’s singing…”

With two outstanding sides, this pressing gets two critically important elements of the recording right: the strings in the orchestra, and, for obvious reasons, even more importantly, Linda’s voice. We guarantee that these sides give you a more natural-sounding Linda than you’ve ever heard, or your money back. (more…)

Linda Ronstadt – This Album from 1969 Did Not Make the Grade

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Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Linda Ronstadt

Transistory and veiled. Not worth the Capitol vinyl it was pressed on. Not the least bit enjoyable on today’s much more revealing high quality equipment.

The only stereo that can play a record that sounds the way this album does is a stereo that is powered by a pair of vintage tube amps like the Macs seen below, or something like them. (Some modern amps try to recreate that sound, and if you want to hear what is on your records, you had best avoid them.)

The above approach to record playback is also very good at hiding the faults of the Modern Heavy Vinyl record.

Remastering Out The Good Stuff

What is lost in the newly remastered recordings so popular with the record buying public these days?

Lots of things, but the most obvious and irritating is the loss of transparency.

Modern records tend to be small, veiled and recessed, and they rarely image well. But the most important quality they lack is transparency. Almost without exception they are opaque. They resist our efforts to hear into the music and get lost in it.

We don’t like that sound, and we like it less with each passing day, although we certainly used to put up with it back when we were selling what we considered to be the better Heavy Vinyl pressings from the likes of DCC, Speakers Corner, Cisco and even some Classic Records.

Now when we play the vinyl those companies produced they either bore us to tears or frustrate us with their veiled, vague, lifeless, ambience-challenged presentation.

It was sometime in 2007 when we turned a corner. The remastered Blue on Rhino Heavy Vinyl came out and was such a mediocrity that we asked ourselves “Why are we bothering?” That was all she wrote.

We stopped selling those third-rate remasters and dedicated ourselves to finding, cleaning, playing and critically evaluating vintage pressings, regardless of era or genre of music.

The result is a website full of great sounding records that should find special appeal with audiophiles who set high standards, who own good equipment and who have well-developed critical listening skills.

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Linda Ronstadt – Lush Life

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  • An outstanding copy of Ronstadt’s 1984 release with Double Plus (A++) sound or very close to it on both sides
  • Getting the strings to sound sweet and rosiny, not smeary and hard, is no mean feat, but it’s the kind of thing the better Hot Stamper pressings are guaranteed to give you on any of Linda’s American Songbook albums
  • “What’s New illustrated that Linda Ronstadt was no longer interested in contemporary pop, and since it was a surprise success, there was no reason not to repeat the formula on Lush Life. Working again with Nelson Riddle, Ronstadt runs through several pop standards — ‘When I Fall in Love,’ ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ ‘Falling in Love Again,’ ‘It Never Entered My Mind’…”

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Linda Ronstadt – Simple Dreams

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  • An original Asylum pressing with seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • Linda’s best sounding recording and a proud member of our Top 100 – this is the album that showed us she could do it all
  • Val Garay does it again, filling the grooves with his trademark super-punchy, jump-out-the-speakers, rich and smooth ANALOG sound
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…reconfirms [Rondstadt’s] substantial talents as an interpretive singer…and [her] powerful performance makes the record rival Heart Like a Wheel in sheer overall quality.”
  • If you’re a Linda Ronstadt fan, this undeniable classic from 1977 is surely a Must Own
  • Simple Dreams is our pick for Linda’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the Best Recording by an Artist or Group can be found here.

This is clearly one of Linda’s best albums and I would have to say, based on my fairly extensive experience with her recorded output, that it is in fact the best sounding record she ever made. I love Heart Like a Wheel, but it sure doesn’t sound like this, not even on the Triple Plus copies that win our shootouts. (It is her best album, though.)

I confess to having never taken the album seriously, dismissing it as a commercial collection of pop hits with about as much depth as the L.A. River — but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is a great sounding album on the right pressing, not the compressed piece of grainy cardboard we’ve all been playing for years, unaware of the tremendous sound quality lurking in the grooves of other copies; the ones that were blessed with the right stampers, the right vinyl and a healthy amount of fairy dust wafting over the press that day.

That’s what Hot Stamper shootouts are all about — finding those copies, the ones no one knows exist. (No one but us it seems; who else would think to put this album in their Top 100?)

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