Top Artists – Paul Simon (with or without) Garfunkel

What to Think When a New Version of Graceland Is Completely Unrecognizable?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now

Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd come from?

Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version (maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened).

Can that possibly be a good thing?

Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.

On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.

We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.

Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.

The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.

Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!

Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.

But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.

VTA

You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.

The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.

You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?

The Bright Side

Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.

The CD already exists. It has a sound.

The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.

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Paul Simon – There Goes Rhymin’ Simon

More Paul Simon

More Rock and Pop

 

  • A vintage Columbia stereo pressing of Simon’s third solo album with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • The sound is big, warm and full-bodied (particularly on side two) – it’s much more present and clear, and not nearly as harsh or gritty as far too many of the copies we played were
  • Great songs including “Kodachrome,” “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Was a Sunny Day” (and you probably know most of the other 7)
  • 5 stars: “Retaining the buoyant musical feel of Paul Simon, but employing a more produced sound, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon found Paul Simon writing and performing with assurance and venturing into soulful and R&B-oriented music.”
  • If you’re a Paul Simon fan, this has to be considered a Must Own Title of his from 1973.
  • The complete list of titles from 1973 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

Most pressings don’t have anywhere near this kind of openness and transparency — and they don’t have this kind of richness or warmth either. It’s a real treat to hear these great songs finally get the sound they deserve.

On most pressings, Simon’s voice is a spitty, gritty mess — sure it’s present, but where is the sweetness and warmth?

Well, as a copy like this proves, more of those qualities made it to the tape than you might think

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Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years

More Paul Simon

More Rock and Pop

  • With two INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides, this vintage pressing is certainly as good a copy as we have ever heard
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “rich and 3D vox”…”excellent space and detail”…”dynamic chorus”…”deep, note-like bass”
  • A tough album to find with the kind of big, spacious, Tubey Magical sound this pressing offers
  • Clean, clear and open are nice qualities to have, but the richer, smoother, more natural sounding copies are the only ones ever good enough to be called Hot Stampers
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…he was never more in tune with his audience: Still Crazy topped the charts, spawned four Top 40 hits, and won Grammys for Song of the Year and Best Vocal Performance.”
  • If you’re a Paul Simon fan, this has to be considered a Must Own Title of his from 1975.
  • The complete list of titles from 1975 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

The overall sound here is big and rich. You get texture to the instruments (check the strings in the title track) but a smooth quality to the vocals instead of the grit and strain you hear on most copies. There’s good extension up top and weight down low.

Four Critical Test Tracks

What separates the mediocre-to-bad-sounding average copy from a Hot Stamper on side one is how well mastered and pressed (yes, pressed, because we shouldn’t overlook what bad vinyl can do to the sound) two songs are: Still Crazy After All These Years and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

If you get those two tracks right — breathy vocals, sounding smooth and sweet, with the sibilance under control, supported by good solid bass — the whole side is going to be good, maybe even amazingly good.

On side two listen to Have a Good Time and You’re Kind. On the better Hot Stamper copies, both will sound wonderful.

You can find this album in any store any day of the week, but let me tell you — most copies out there are godawful. I couldn’t stand to sit through another grainy, dry pressing of this album with a gun to my head — it doesn’t matter how good the music is.

On the best copies, however, it’s a whole different story.

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Paul Simon – Graceland

More Paul Simon

Hot Stamper Pressings of Graceland Available Now


  • With two outstanding Double Plus (A++) sides, you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this vintage pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Richer and smoother, two important qualities all the best pressings must have, yet still clear and resolving – this is the sound you want for Graceland
  • Guaranteed to trounce the well-reviewed but nevertheless awful Heavy Vinyl LP in every way, or your money back and the shipping is on us
  • There’s a delicate, extended top end on this pressing that simply does not exist on the new reissue
  • 5 stars: “An enormously successful record, Graceland became the standard against which subsequent musical experiments by major artists were measured.”

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Listening in Depth to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.

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

Side One

Scarborough Fair/Canticle

Listen carefully to the voices on this track, one of our favorites to test with. On the best copies they sound exceptionally delicate yet full-bodied.

Patterns

The percussion on this track is a great test for smear, a problem that plagues most pressings to one degree or another. On the better copies you’ll distinctly hear the sound of the drummer’s hands hitting the skins of the bongos, as well as lots of ambience and echo around the drums.

Note also that every stereo copy we’ve ever played spits at least a little on this song.

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For the Best Sound, Stick to the 360s on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More superb sound from the legendary CBS 30th street studios in New York!

This album checks off some big boxes for us here at Better Records.

Turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and you’ll have one of the best — if not THE best — folk duos of all time performing right there in your listening room for you. The sound is open, spacious, and transparent with breathy vocals and unusually low levels of spit. The strings are more dynamic than we’re used to hearing and the bottom end has really nice weight to it.

These old Simon & Garfunkel records weren’t often owned by audiophiles who kept their records in pristine condition. 

No, these were the popular records of their day, purchased by the record-buying public, and they were played and played hard, typically on cheap equipment. There are many quiet passages on this album that are going to reveal whatever surface issues might exist, so a copy that plays Mint Minus Minus is about as good as you can hope for.

Since only the right vintage 360 pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell.

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Letter of the Week – “whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently

Hey Tom, 

That latest S&G album — BOTW — is absofuckinglutely blowing my mind tonight. Wow. Those deep horns (?) blasting at times (end of Keep the Customer Satisfied, chorus of Why Don’t You Write Me, end of The Boxer… whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound. Hard to sit down!!

Dear C.

The power of those horns is exactly what I was telling you about –  they cannot be reproduced properly until you have speakers with dynamic drivers large enough to play the full weight of the brass.

TP

We discuss the idea of Big Speakers in this boilerplate commentary all over the site:

Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Further Reading

Listening in Depth to Bookends

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Musically side two is one of the strongest in the entire Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre (if you’ll pardon my French). Each of the five songs could hold its own as a potential hit on the radio, and there is no filler to be found anywhere. How many albums from 1968 can make that claim?

The estimable Roy Halee handled the engineering duties. Not the most ‘natural” sounding record he ever made — the processing is heavy handed on a number of tracks — but that’s clearly not what neither he nor the duo were going for.

If you want natural, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme has what you are looking for. That said, as of 2022 both are Top 100 Titles.

The three of them would obviously take their sound much farther in that direction with the Grammy winning Bridge Over Troubled Water from 1970.

The bigger production songs on this album have a tendency to get congested on even the best pressings, which is not uncommon for four track recordings from the 60s. Those of you with properly set up high-dollar front ends should have less of a problem than some. $3000 cartridges can usually deal with this kind of complex information better than $300 ones.

But not always. Expensive does not always mean better, since painstaking and exacting setup is so essential to proper playback.

The Wrecking Crew provided top quality backup, with Hal Blaine on drums and percussion, Joe Osborn on bass and Larry Knechtel on piano and keyboards.

Side One

Bookends Theme
Save the Life of My Child

I used to think this track would never sound good enough to use as an evaluation track. It’s a huge production that I’d found practically impossible to get to sound right on even the best original copies of the album. Even as recently as ten years ago I had basically given up trying.

Thankfully things have changed. Nowadays, with great copies at our disposal and a system that is really cooking, virtually all of the harmonic distortion in the big chorus near the opening disappears. It takes a very special pressing and a very special stereo to play this song.

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Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

More Simon and Garfunkel

Reviews and Commentaries for Bridge Over Troubled Water

  • This pressing of Simon & Garfunkel’s classic boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a seriously good Double Plus (A++) side two
  • There’s a reason you see this title on our site so infrequently – we have a devil of a time finding lightly-played 360s without significant marks or surface noise, especially on the title track
  • The sound is big, lively, and clear, with the kind of Tubey Magical richness that only the best 360 pressings can offer
  • Surely this is by far the toughest album of theirs to find with top quality sound and decent surfaces
  • This Magnum Opus ended the duo’s collaboration with a ginormous over-the-top production, which taxed the recording technology of the day and is sure to tax any system that attempts to reproduce it
  • 5 stars: “Perhaps the most delicately textured album to close out the 1960s from any major rock act… the songs matched the standard of craftsmanship that had been established on the duo’s two prior albums”
  • We’ve auditioned many pressings of BOTW, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS Half-Speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999. There have been many more remastered since these came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days of other titles, so we haven’t auditioned any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time. If any of the labels currently making records start to make good ones, please let us know.

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Simon and Garfunkel – Sounds of Silence

More Simon and Garfunkel

More Folk Rock

  • Boasting two excellent Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, this vintage 360 Stereo pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on S&G’s sophomore release
  • Forget that critical listening stuff and just notice that these hot copies are simply more relaxed, musical and involving
  • Although the rock tracks come to life and really do sound good, the Tubey Magical folkie tracks are the real reason to play the album
  • “A work of finely expressed folk. It’s arguably the duo’s big breakout, a crossover success with some handsome hits.” — COS

The sound is big, open, rich and full, with the performers front and center. This 360 Stereo pressing also has the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s no doubt missing from whatever 180g reissue has been made from the 50+ year old tapes. As good as that pressing may be, we guarantee that this one is dramatically more REAL SOUNDING. It gives you the sense that Simon and Garfunkel are right in the room with you. (more…)