More of the Music of Steve Winwood
A long, long time ago, probably at the start of the 2000s, we put up this early UK pressing on the Island pink label. Charged good money for it, too, justified by the fact that the early pink label pressing would be assumed to have the best sound for audiophiles in search of higher fidelity.
Back then we didn’t know what we know now, which is that the right reissues are dramatically better sounding.
In fact, they handily win our shootouts, something they have been doing for at least the last ten years or so.
We’ve run into so many sonically-flawed Pink label Island pressings by now that hearing one sound lackluster if not actually awful doesn’t phase us in the least. Some of the other pink label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.
But before that, back in the dark days of the early 2000s, we clearly were lacking a comprehensive understading of the sound of the various UK pressings of the album. There was a great deal more research and development to be done. Eventually our efforts led to a breakthrough in 2006.
For more than twenty years, this is the kind of work we have been undertaking. Why? Because we get paid to do it.
We may be the most knowledgable experts on the planet when it comes to the best sounding pressings of audiophile-quality recordings — if we’re not I’d like to know who is, and how they came by that information — but that doesn’t mean we know it all.
If we come across that way, it’s the result no doubt of our enthusiastic responses to the hundreds of amazing records we’ve had the pleasure to hear. For example, here’s one, and of course there are literally hundreds and hundreds of others with similarly over-the-top notes. Allow me to apologize for any misunderstanding our commentary may have caused.
One thing we do know: all knowledge, of records or anything else you care to name, is provisional.
If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our live and learn section.
We regularly learn from our mistakes — like the record reviewed here — and we hope you do too.
However, we learn things from the records we play — not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our record experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and rankings for all the records in between.
We’ve achieved our results by purposefully ignoring everything there is to know about a record — who made it, how they made it, when they made it — everything, that is, but the sound coming out of the speakers of our reference system.
More of the Music of Traffic