Top Artists – Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney & Wings – Venus and Mars

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  • This vintage British pressing is doing practically everything right, with incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades from start to finish, just shy of our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • We shot out a number of other imports and this one had better midrange presence, bass, and dynamics than practically any other copy we played
  • These sides have real depth to the soundfield, full-bodied, present vocals, plenty of bottom end weight, and lovely analog warmth
  • “Venus and Mars is an interesting mix of musical styles, punctuated by Paul McCartney’s unerring sense of melody and hooky songs.” – Oldies.com
  • These are the stampers that always win our shootouts, and when you hear them you will know why – the sound is big, rich and clear like no other
  • We’ve discovered a number of titles in which one stamper always wins, and here are some others

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…)

Unplugged – Sonic Pros and Cons

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

The best pressings of this album convey the immediacy of a live show, one which just happens to be fronted by one of the greatest performers in the history of popular music, Paul McCartney.

On the best copies, the sound is warmer, richer, and sweeter, or in a word, more ANALOG sounding. You get more extension up top, more weight down low, and more transparency in the midrange.

It’s surprising just how veiled and two-dimensional so many copies sound, considering this is a live recording with not a lot of processing.

As a digital recording, some of that processing is baked into the tape. Unplugged will  never sound as good as this McCartney album, but that’s to be expected.

The bulk of the recordings from 1991 are simply not competitive with those from 1970, not by a long shot. There were hundreds of great records recorded or released in 1970. There are 19 Hot Stamper pressings of them on the site as I write this. I would have a hard time finding even a half-dozen from 1991.

Stick with the Early Pressings

This isn’t your typical rock record that sounds like crap on eight out of ten copies. Most early pressings of Unplugged sound pretty good. The later reissues are terrible, which should come as no surprise. Rarely are late reissues of rock and pop albums any good.

We did hear quite a few copies that had a somewhat brittle quality to the top end, with no real extension to speak of. It wasn’t ever a dealbreaker, but the copies with a silky openness up there are much more enjoyable — and, unfortunately, not all that common.

There are copies that lack warmth, copies that never fully come to life, and copies that are a bit dark.

Some that we auditioned didn’t seem to get the breath in the vocals, and others lacked weight to the piano.

Again — not one of the early pressings we played sounded BAD, but many of them definitely sounded dry, boring and lifeless.

It’s nice when the copy in hand has all the transparency, space, layered depth and three-dimensionality that makes listening to records such a fundamentally different experience than listening to CD playback, but it’s not nearly as important as having a richer, more relaxed tonal balance.

A little smear and a lack of resolution are not the end of the world on this album.

Brightness, along with too much grain and grit, can be.

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and grain
  2. Midrange tonality
  3. Lower midrange richness
  4. Upper midrange brightness

Further Reading

Paul McCartney – Wings at the Speed of Sound

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  • Killer sound throughout this vintage Capitol pressing of Wings’ follow-up to Venus and Mars, with a Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side two
  • This copy has a “cinematic” quality – it’s just plain bigger, with more depth to the soundfield, and more energy than we remember from the last time we did the shootout
  • The big hits, “Let ‘Em In” and “Silly Love Songs,” as well as minor gems such as “Beware My Love,” are outstanding here, with good body and a smoother, more natural, but still extended top end
  • The right stampers are key on this title, and these are definitely the right ones
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • “…At the Speed of Sound ostensibly invites the listener to spend a day with McCartney and Wings—a day in which the listener is gently harangued as well as entertained.” – Rolling Stone

The better copies such as this one had the qualities that really make the songs come to life and give you a taste of the old McCartney magic.

Import Vs. Domestic

We’ve played plenty of both and in our experience the best domestic pressings are clearly superior. This is not true for many of McCartney’s albums but it is definitely true for this Wings at the Speed of Sound and his first, McCartney.

The copies that were flatter, more transistory, more opaque, less present; the ones that had no real extension up high or down low, or little in the way of Tubey Magic — here we are basically describing the all-too-common typical pressing — simply did not make the cut and ended up in the trade pile. That’s not our sound and never has been.

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In 2016 We Had to Raise the Bar for Wings at the Speed of Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Okay, we’re not too proud to admit it.

We was wrong about Wings at the Speed of Sound as a recording.

Yes, that kind of thing happens when you regularly play thousands and thousands of records year after year.

The right pressing can show you that your understanding of a given recording is, shall we say, incomplete.

The great thing about our business is that, whenever we have new data that serves to correct a past mistaken judgment, the result is that we are then able to offer even better sounding pressings to our customers.

That way everybody wins. We’ve never pretended to know it all, and there’s no reason for us to start now.

Back to Wings at the Speed of Sound. Previously we had written:

I can’t even begin to convey to you what a rough shootout this was. Copy after copy bored us to tears and most of them were too noisy. It was one of those shootouts that almost defeated us, but we persevered and managed to find a few Hot Stampers. They didn’t do miracles and turn Speed Of Sound into a stunning Demo Disc, but they sounded musical, correct and enjoyable, and that seems to be all you can ask for on this album. 

This is not true.

We played a copy that earned our very special grade of Four Pluses (on one side, two sides would have been too much to ask for) because it showed us an At the Speed of Sound that we had no idea could possibly exist, this after having played dozens of imports and domestic pressings over the previous twenty years or so.

It was DRAMATICALLY bigger and more transparent, with no sacrifice in richness or smoothness.

Here was a very different Wings at the Speed of Sound. Why did it take us so long to find it?

We had never managed to clean and play a copy with the right stampers that could show us the brilliance of the sound that must be on the master tape. We needed to do more research and development, which of course we are in the habit of doing regularly with Classic Rock records, our bread and butter and the heart of our business.

Before we did this shootout, we had no idea how high to set the bar. Which leads us to:

This Key Takeaway 

In that respect we were in exactly the same place as every record loving audiophile on the face of the Earth.

How good can the record sound? How high is up?

We discussed this all-too-common mystery [1] in a listing we wrote for an amazing sounding copy of Heart’s Little Queen album we discovered many years ago, linked here.

In our old listing, we noted: Now that we know what stampers to look for, future pressings are likely to be very, very good sounding, if everything goes the way we hope it will.

[Things did go our way, with plenty of Shootout Winning White Hot copies having been found since we made that breakthrough all the way back in 2016. The right stampers are about five times more rare than the wrong ones, but they can be found. You just have to know what to look for.] 

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Paul McCartney & Wings – Wings Over America

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More of The Beatles

  • With excellent sound on all six sides, these vintage Capitol pressings will be very hard to beat
  • SIX sides of live Wings music, phew! As I’m sure you can imagine, this shootout was quite the undertaking
  • This copy was just BIGGER and RICHER than most others we played – it’s clean, clear and full-bodied with a solid bottom end, tons of energy and lots of space around all of the musicians
  • “… the Beatles mystique was still very much attached to record and artist alike… and it seemed like McCartney represented the part of the group’s legacy that came closest to living up to fans’ expectations. Thus the album ended up selling in numbers, rivaling the likes of Frampton Comes Alive and other mega-hits of the period, and rode the charts for months.”
  • If you’re a McCartney fan, this title from 1976 is surely of interest, assuming you already have the first album, Unplugged and Band on the Run, and maybe Ram – all Must Own Titles or something close to them

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Paul McCartney – McCartney II

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  • Boasting KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout, this vintage British pressing could not be beat
  • Forget the dubby domestic pressings – these UK imports are the only ones that can deliver the McCartney II Magic
  • Both of these sides are clean, clear, and dynamic with lots of Tubey Magic and a huge bottom end
  • “Entitled McCartney II because its one-man band approach mirrors that of his first solo album, Paul McCartney’s first record since the breakup of Wings was greeted upon its release as a return to form… [It] finds Paul in an adventurous state of mind, which is a relief after years of formulaic pop.”

If you’ve heard the album, you know it’s not exactly a straight-ahead pop record. Paul is in his one-man-band mode here, just as he was for his brilliant solo debut, but this time around he relies more on synth-heavy arrangements and plenty of studio experimentation. Assuming you have the right pressing, UK only in our experience, it can be a very good sounding record. (more…)

This Is Not a Cheap Hobby If You Want to Get Very Far

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. McCartney’s first album is one of them.

(We have a section for records that tend to be noisy, and it can be found here.)

Rick sent us a letter recently after having played his first Hot Stamper, the first record he ever bought from us. At $300 it wasn’t exactly cheap, but the best things in life never are, and certainly there is little in the world of audio that’s cheap and of much value.

This is not a cheap hobby if you want to do it right, and even tons of money doesn’t guarantee you will get good sound. It’s far more complicated than that. To quote Winston Churchill, you must be prepared to offer your  “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Churchill went on to say “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs… Victory, however long and hard the road may be…”

Now, he wasn’t talking about audio, but he could have been, and I certainly am. It takes the serious commitment of resources — money and labor — to get the sound you want. That is the victory I am talking about.

On our Hot Stamper McCartney album, Rick no doubt heard the sound he was looking for — and then some — judging by his letter.

Hi Tom,

Well, I knew you guys were serious upon receiving the LP in 4 layers of wrapping and padding but when I put the disc on I was pretty stunned. Virtually everything was popping and so musical and rich sounding. Nothing like the 3 other pressings I’ve had of this recording in the past, the last of which I actually sailed out the window after 2 minutes of playing.

Every Night just sounds incredible, especially when he drops the bass an octave. And Maybe I’m Amazed gave me goosebumps for the first time since I bought it the week it came out. Also heard something on that track I never did (or could hear) before. During the guitar solo there’s a single high pitched vocal kind of buried in the background. Almost sounds like a mistake, making me think it could be Linda and Paul did what he could. Pretty wild.

My only very slight criticism is there is some surface noise but this is very overshadowed by all the positives. Overall it is superb. Can I give you guys a short list of LPs I’m looking for?

Thanks so much!

Best
Rick M.

Rick, we are so happy to hear you loved that record as much as we did. We have been touting McCartney’s first solo album for more than a decade. Ever read a word about it in an audiophile context elsewhere? Of course you haven’t! The audiophile world doesn’t know and doesn’t care about great albums like this one, but we at Better Records LIVE for  sound and music of this caliber.

It’s a permanent resident of our rock and pop Top 100 list for a reason: no other solo album by a Beatle can touch it.

As for surface issues, we wish we could find quietpressings of the album, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus is roughly what yours was graded and that is certainly not dead quiet by any stretch. As we said:

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Paul McCartney and Wings – Ram

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  • This early Apple pressing was doing practically everything right, with both sides earning killer Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • A copy like this is a real audiophile treat – here is the rich, warm, clear, natural and lively sound you want for this Five Star follow-up to his solo debut
  • Many of McCartney’s most memorable songs are here: “Too Many People,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” “Monkberry Moon Delight,” “Heart Of The Country” and more
  • 5 stars: “These songs may not be self-styled major statements, but they are endearing and enduring, as is Ram itself, which seems like a more unique, exquisite pleasure with each passing year.”

I remember this album being dismissed as lightweight back in the day and I may have even agreed with that estimation, to be honest. Heck, compared to Abbey Road and The White Album, the very same thing could be said about all of McCartney’s albums, including my favorite, his solo debut.

McCartney isn’t out to blow you away with high-production value rock here, apart from Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. He’s making some lovely pop music with his wife and sharing it with the world. And what’s so wrong with that?

The Five Star All Music Guide review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine (the best writer at AMG for our money) nails it, and we recommend you click on the Review tab above to give it the once over.

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Paul McCartney and Wings – London Town

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  • A vintage import pressing with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from first note to last
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this stunning copy in our notes: “sweet and rich vox”…”big and rich”…”heavy, deep bass”…”weighty and rich [piano] keys”…”jumping out of the speakers”
  • Clean, clear, and full-bodied with a solid bottom end – this copy was a big step up over practically all others in our recent shootout
  • Forget the dubby domestic pressings and whatever crappy Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – the UK LPs are the only way to fly on London Town
  • 4 star: “… it’s certainly stronger than Speed and, in its own way, as satisfying as Venus and Mars… It’s a laid-back, almost effortless collection of professional pop and, as such, it’s one of his strongest albums.”

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Unfortunately, Some Truly Great Records Are Almost Always Noisy

More of the Music of Paul McCartney

Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. This is one of them. Copies of McCartney’s first album can rarely be found on the site, but if there are any copies available, they are most likely in our section for records with condition issues, which contains about 30% of all the Hot Stamper pressings active on the site at any one time.

Hot Stampers are almost exclusively vintage vinyl pressings — “old records” you might say — and old records, even after a good cleaning, are rarely quiet. (We lay out the particulars of our grading system here.)

One of our customers noted that the Hot Stamper we sent him of McCartney’s first album was a bit noisier than he would have liked. We replied:

As for surface issues, we wish we could find them quiet, but that is simply not an option, especially considering how dynamic the recording is. In the listing we noted:

We’ve used every trick in the book to try to get copies of this album to play Mint Minus, but it’s not usually in the cards. Maybe I’m Amazed, in particular, seems to be noisy on nine copies out of ten. If you’re looking for a copy without any surface noise, you’re probably better off tracking down the DCC Gold CD, which is actually quite good.

But no CD is ever going to sound like the record we sent you, not now, not ever. And we feel like throwing many of the copies we play of this album out the window too!

This is where I simply can’t understand how the typical audiophile can make the tradeoff for flat, average sound with quiet vinyl — the sound of these Heavy Vinyl reissues that have sprouted up all over the place, each one worse than the last — and the wonderful, but slightly noisy, sound to be found on the best originals.

You can find more about the subject here.

Counterintuitive Thinking About Front Ends

The better your front end is, the less likely you are to have a problem with noisy vinyl, which is the opposite of what many audiophiles believe to be the case. Some of the cheaper tables, arms and carts seem to make the surface noise more objectionable, not less.

On the other hand, some pricey cartridges — the Benz line comes to mind — are consistently noisier than those by Dynavector, Lyra and others, in our experience anyway.

As long as vintage vinyl is the only vinyl with sound worth pursuing, as is surely the case these days and will be for the forseeable future, a quiet cartridge and a very high quality arm are essential to high quality playback.

Our Dynavector 17Dx gets down deep into the groove, where vintage used records have the least number of problems created by their previous owners.

Mated to the wonderful Triplanar arm you see above, all your records should play more quietly and correctly than you ever thought possible.

We are dealers for both, as well as the Seismic Platform. It too reduces distortion and noise in your system.

The 150 or more records listed here will often be noisy, but based on our experience, the noise will be less objectionable if you make better choices with your table, arm, cartridge and vibration control.

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