Top Artists – Queen

A Night at the Opera – A DCC Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This DCC pressing is a disaster, one of the worst releases that Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman ever mastered.

Murky, opaque and compressed: yes, we can agree it has never been an especially good sounding record on anything but the most difficult to find UK pressings [and we know exactly which ones those are now, which only makes this record sound even worse in comparison], but does it deserve this kind of mastering disrespect?

Isn’t the idea to try and FIX what is wrong, rather than to make it worse?

Whether made by DCC or any other label, starting at some point in the mid-90s many audiophile pressings started to have a shortcoming that we find insufferable these days — they are just too damn smooth.

At collector prices no less. Don’t waste your money.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Our advice: don’t do it.

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Jazz – Rockin’ Out with Fat Bottomed Girls

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Queen

Hot Stamper Albums with Huge Choruses

There is a tendency in the recording to be a little “hot” tonally on the vocals and snare. The better copies like this one keep it under control, with the lesser copies getting much too lean and gritty to play loudly. What good is a raver like Fat Bottomed Girls if you can’t turn it up and really rock out with it? 

Roy Thomas Baker is back on the scene here for Jazz, his first production with the band since 1975’s A Night at the Opera, and the last time he would work with Freddie and the boys.

On side one check out the low harmony vocal on the first track. The big kick drum is also a treat. RTB loves his bass, that’s for sure.

Both sides should have an open, extended top end and a solid, rich bottom. Our best copies were big and clear with plenty of rock bottom end and Whomp Factor.

We Love Dynamic Choruses, and These Are Amazing

This is one of the rare pop/rock albums that dramatically changes levels as it moves from the verses to the choruses of many its songs, especially the anthemic Fat Bottomed Girls. Mustapha, the first track on side one, has a huge finish as well. It can take a record like this to open your ears to how compressed practically every rock album you own is.

The sad fact of the matter is that most mixes for rock and pop recordings are just too safe. The engineers and producers believe that the mixes have to be safe for the average (read: crap) stereo to play the record.

We like it when music gets loud. It gets loud in live performance — why shouldn’t most of that wonderful energy make it to the record?

News of the World is incredibly dynamic and powerful in this respect, our pick for the best recording by the band, but Jazz on its best cuts is not very far behind it.

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Queen – Hot Space

More Queen

Hot Stamper Albums with Huge Choruses

  • With Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side one and an outstanding Double Plus (A++) side two, this copy of Hot Space took top honors in our recent shootout
  • The best pressings – like this one – have plenty of bass and are smoother and fuller than the rest
  • Disco, funk, rhythm and blues, dance and pop music all found their way onto this 1982 release -the monster hit Under Pressure with none other than Mr. David Bowie closes out side two
  • “Hot Space is an essential cog for Queen completists… [it] has invention and ideas to spare.”

Queen albums in general are notoriously hard to find good sound for, and Queen albums from 1982 are probably even harder.

We’re guessing this album’s appeal is probably limited to fans of the band, but for those of you who want something different, or to hear Under Pressure sound good, we offer Hot Space with White Hot Stamper sound. (more…)

What to Listen For on Queen’s The Game

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

Years ago we wrote:

The best sounding side ones were rarely as good as the best sounding side twos.

Not sure if that’s still true but you can check your own copy and see how the two sides compare.

Here some more records that often display side to side differences.

Even the good side ones tended to have a trace of harmonic distortion and compression that is simply nowhere to be found on the good side twos. How and why this is we have no idea. Since every copy had the same sonic issues, we discounted it in our grading. Only the better copies bring the hits on side one to life and give them the size and power we know they can have.

One of the qualities we don’t talk about nearly enough on the site is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. So many copies of this album just sound small, or at least smaller — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. Other copies do. They create a huge soundfield from which the instruments and voices positively jump out of the speakers. When you hear a copy that can do that, needless to say (to anyone on this site), it’s an entirely different listening experience.

Dirty Little Secrets

The Game is clearly one of the two best sounding records Queen ever made. The Dirty Little Secret of Queen’s recorded output is that most of their albums have mediocre sound, and often they’re downright dreadful.

Do you see a lot of Queen albums going up on the site? The demand is there, but where is the supply?

There’s a good reason for their scarcity as Hot Stampers. As much as people might love to hear some top quality pressing of Queen on vinyl, we just can’t seem to find many that do their brand of multi-layered Big Production Rock justice.

Take A Night at the Opera for example. Isn’t it supposed to be a good sounding record? I’ve played twenty of them over the last ten years — imports, domestics, the DCC, the MoFi – and practically none of them sounded as good as I was expecting. If you think the album is well recorded, don’t just rely on your memory. Pull out your own copy and listen to it closely; you should hear the same distortion and smearing and transistory grain that’s on all the copies I’ve played.

It’s a record that’s trying to sound good but just doesn’t — so far anyway.

Hope springs eternal, and of course we will keep looking, but for now the Queen titles we know to have the potential to sound good are pretty much limited to A Day at the Races, News of the World and The Game.

UPDATE 2015 or so

GOOD NEWS – We now know which pressings sound good, and they sound very good indeed!

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