Top Artists – Superrtramp

Letter of the Week – “I couldn’t be happier. I confess I am a little emotional now.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom, 

Just received by delivery this afternoon. I am just about beginning to realize what a good pressing really means…

I have only been able to listen to Supertramp [Even in the Quietest Moments] and The Final Cut until now. While Supertramp is excellent, the Final Cut is simply astounding!!

I really am at a loss of words so I will just say that I really am listening to completely new music.

I can’t come to terms with the fact that there is so much information buried in those grooves that I am listening to, honest to God, for the very first time… And the Final Cut is my favorite Floyd!

I couldn’t be happier. I confess I am a little emotional now. By no means, is this a casual purchase but boy… I think this is worth its weight in gold!

I’ll be back for more!!

Sujay

Dear Sujay,

Thanks for writing. So glad to hear you couldn’t be happier. That is exactly the reaction we were looking for.

Best, TP

P.S.

Sujay hasn’t bought any Hot Stampers from us since 2016. We doubt he went over to the dark side — that almost never happens — but anything is possible. Nevertheless we wish him well.

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Our First Shootout for Crime of the Century Was a Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Those of you who’ve watched the site over many years may know this, but it bears mentioning — it was rare for us to have Hot Stamper copies of this album to offer our customers back in the day. The first White Hot Stamper copy went up in 2008 and the next one didn’t go up until 2011(!).

Here’s what we had to say about that sorry state of affairs in 2008.

We actually attempted an all-day shootout late in 2007 that we had to abandon after every copy we played — without exception, mind you — either sounded bad or was too noisy to sell. We must have tried at least ten good-looking British pressings,only to come up empty-handed at the end of the day.

The Speakers Corner pressing beats the average original, I can tell you that without fear of contradiction.

Of course, all Speakers Corner copies are going to sound different — perhaps our review copy is one of the Hot ones.

By 2011 we had gained some perspective.

The bit about the Speakers Corner pressings sounding different has now been proven beyond any doubt. The copy we cracked open for one of our later shootouts didn’t sound nearly as good as the one we played in 2007.

UPDATE 2025

It’s important to remember that the stereo, our cleaning technologies, and, most importantly, even our ears were different 15 years ago. And, during our formative shootout years, lots of audio progress was made, especially from 2007 to 2011. 2007 is when we discovered the Prelude Record Cleaning system, and that pretty much changed everything for us.

Our Take from 2007

The early British pressings have a smoother midrange compared to practically anything else out there. You may have noticed that good British copies never make it to the site, and there’s a simple explanation for that.

Most early British copies (and later ones too) just do not sound good. On top of that, they are rarely quiet enough to play and enjoy. I can’t tell you how many British COTC pressings I’ve heard in the last 5 years that didn’t sound good or were noisy and groove damaged. But it’s a lot.

Well, things have certainly changed. The British copies do very well in our shootouts these days.  Up until 2020, the right domestic pressings were sometimes winning shootouts.

Now we believe the Brits have the potential for the best sound. Here is a recent example that went for big bucks.

All it takes is for the right domestic pressing to win a shootout and we will be back to saying what is probably the best way to think about the album — both domestics and imports can sound amazingly good.

It all comes down to the copies you have on hand, how you clean them and how well you can play them.

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Supertramp – Even In The Quietest Moments (Domestic)

More of the Music of Supertramp

  • Boasting two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Supertramp’s 1977 release sound this good – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • On side two, the recording quality of the solo piano at the start of the second track is nothing short of breathtaking
  • No piano on any Supertramp album sounds more powerful, more real or more present than the one on “From Now On”
  • The bottom end is big and punchy, the top is smooth and sweet, and the vocals are present and breathy
  • On a transparent copy such as this, the drums really punch through the dense mixes clearly, giving the music more life and energy
  • “…it’s a transitional album, bridging the gap between Crime of the Century and the forthcoming Breakfast in America… [it] has plenty of fine moments aside from ‘Give A Little Bit,’ including the music hall shuffle of ‘Loverboy,’ the Euro-artiness of ‘From Now On,’ and the ‘Fool on a Hill’ allusions on ‘Fool’s Overture.'”
  • If you’re a Supertramp fan like me, this art rock classic from 1977 belongs in your collection.

What To Listen For

The piano on “Give A Little Bit” can get buried in the dense mix. Side ones that are rich and tubey and smooth with a clear piano did very well in our shootout.

“Lover Boy” is a Demo Quality Track on the better copies. It can be huge, spacious and lively. Getting the strings to sound harmonically rich without sliding into shrillness may not be easy but some copies manage it. On the biggest, richest copies the breakdown at about 2:20 is a lot of fun.

On side two, the recording quality of the solo piano at the start of the second track is nothing short of breathtaking. No piano on any Supertramp album sounds as good.

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Even In The Quietest Moments and Your 1977 Ears – There’s No Going Back

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Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

By 1977 I was a huge fan of the band, having first discovered their music on Crisis (1975) and Crime (1974), in which order I honestly can’t remember.

I played their albums all the time, especially Crisis.

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have been Crime of the Century by Mobile Fidelity, which came out in 1978.

Every right-thinking audiophile had that one — MoFi sold over a hundred thousand of them (along with a hundred thousand of Aja, Touch and one or two others).

And why not? The sound was killer on the systems of the day. Lots of slam down low (but not really that low, although it seemed plenty low at the time), lots of extra top up high, lots of phony detail, just what the old school stereos of the day, like mine, needed.

Crisis? What Crisis? followed in 1975. It was the Supertramp album that sent me over the top. I played that album relentlessly. Before long Art Rock was at the top of my list anytime I wanted to have an immersive musical experience, and that, for an obsessive audiophile like myself, meant almost every day.

Supertramp, Yes, Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, Crack the Sky, ELO, Bowie – it’s all I wanted to listen to back then, and it encouraged me to keep upgrading my equipment whenever I had the money, although I admit to being completely clueless about all of that at the time. More on that subject here.

A year and a half later EITQM followed. It too became a staple of my musical diet. Man, I played that record till the grooves were worn smooth.

I thought the sound of my domestic pressing was killer at the time, too. Crisis was a demo disc at my house and this was right up there with it. Now the obvious question is, did I have a good sounding copy, or did my stereo not reveal to me the shortcomings of my LP? Or maybe my ears were not well enough trained to hear what was wrong.

Those of you who have been doing this for a long time know the answer: any or all of the above, probably all, and nobody can know just how much of each.

And there is no way to find out because you are not that person anymore.

Your 1977 Ears… and Mine

Even if you could recreate your old stereo and room, and find your original copy, there’s one thing you can’t do, and that’s listen to it with your 1977 ears.

Every time you play a record and listen to it critically, your ears get better at their job.

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Three Tracks Are Key on Supertramp’s Fifth Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

On the best copies of Even in the Quietest Moments the bottom end is big and punchy, the top end smooth and sweet, and the vocals are present and breathy.

If your copy sounds like that, you have the basic ingredients for a Hot Stamper pressing. Now all you need is half a dozen more cleaned copies and you are ready to do a shootout to find out just how good your copy may be.

On an exceptionally transparent copy the drums really punch through the dense mixes that Supertramp and Geoff Emerick favored for the album, giving the music more life and energy. (More of Geoff’s work can be found here.)

Also make sure that the piano sounds solid and clear with little to no smear, and that the sax is full and breathy. These are all critically important to getting the record to sound right, which of course is simply another way of saying getting the music to sound right.

In 2005 we wrote:

This is actually one of Supertramp’s best albums but it’s almost impossible to find a domestic copy that won’t tear your head off. The vast majority of them are unbelievably bright and grainy. I’ve been buying them lately because I found a copy or two that seemed to sound pretty good, but most of my money was wasted on aggressive, noisy vinyl.

Side one of this copy is no great shakes — it’s too bright — but side two is actually quite good. The highs are sweet and silky, there’s plenty of bass and the vocals are actually quite natural sounding. I can’t call this a Hot Stamper. The best way to look at it is to say it’s a Relatively Hot Stamper. The average copy is so bad that when a copy like this one sounds pretty good it really sticks out. We’re still in the hunt but haven’t got much to show for our efforts to date, I can tell you that.

The good news is that ten years later and more copies than we care to remember we think we’ve got EITQM’s ticket. We now know which stampers have the potential to sound good as well as the ones to avoid. Finding the right stampers (which are not the original ones for those of you who know what the original stampers for A&M records are) has been a positive boon.

Once we figured them out we were in a much better position to hear just how well recorded the album is. Now we know beyond all doubt that this recording — the first without Ken Scott producing and engineering for this iteration of the band — is of the highest quality, in league with the best. Until recently we would never have made such a bold statement. Now it’s nothing less than obvious.

Key Tracks for Critical Listening

Give a Little Bit

The piano can get buried in the dense mix. Side ones that are rich and tubey and smooth with a clear piano did very well in our shootout.

Lover Boy

A Demo Quality track on the best copies. It can be huge, spacious and lively.

Getting the strings to sound harmonically rich without sliding into shrillness is not easy but some copies manage it. The breakdown at about 2:20 is a lot of fun on the biggest, richest copies.

From Now On

On side two the recording quality of the solo piano at the start of this track is nothing short of breathtaking.

No piano on any Supertramp album sounds as good, and only the White Hot Stamper pressing will get it to sound its best.

It’s such a well-recorded piano that it will always sound at least good.

Shootouts are the only way to know when it actually sounds its best.

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What to Listen For on Breakfast in America

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

What follows is some advice on what to listen for.

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

What to listen for, you ask?

Number One

Too many instruments and voices jammed into too little space in the upper midrange. When the tonality is shifted-up, even slightly, or there is too much compression, there will be too many elements — voices, guitars, drums — vying for space in the upper part of the midrange, causing congestion and a loss of clarity.

With the more solid sounding copies, the lower mids are full and rich; above them, the next “level up” so to speak, there’s plenty of space in which to fit all the instruments and voices comfortably, not piling them one on top of another as is often the case. Consequently, the upper midrange area does not get overloaded and overwhelmed with musical information.

Number Two

Edgy vocals, which is related to Number One above. Any copy short of our White Hot Shootout Winner will have at least some edge to the vocals. The band wants to really belt it out in the choruses, and they do. But the best copies keep the edge under control, without sounding compressed, dark, dull or smeary.

The highest quality equipment, on the hottest Hot Stamper copies, will play the loudest and most difficult to reproduce passages with virtually no edge, grit or grain, even at very loud levels.

Number Three

Size. One of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — 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. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy that does all that, it’s an entirely different listening experience.

Turn this album up good and loud and you will be amazed at how dynamic some of the guitar solos are.

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Even in the Quietest Moments – P & M Stampers Let Us Down This Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

After discovering killer Hot Stampers for this forgotten classic, we feel the album can hold its own with any of Supertramp’s 70s releases, from Crime of the Century all the way through to Breakfast in America.

The UK-pressed White Hot Stamper pressings from our recent shootouts showed us some of the best Supertramp sound we have ever heard on any of their albums, which is saying a lot. Supertramp is one of the most well-recorded bands in the history of pop music. Geoff Emerick took over most of the recording duties after the band decided to work with a different engineer for this, their 1977 album.

KEN SCOTT recorded the two albums that came before this one, Crime and Crisis, and as has been well documented on this very site, he knocked both of them out of the park.

As I’m sure you know, both these gentleman famously engineered The Beatles.

What we didn’t know, not until 2015 anyway, was how amazingly well recorded this album was.

In 2005 we noted that we had basically given up on ever finding a good sounding copy of Even in the Quietest Moments. It’s now ten years later. [Make that twenty.]

Having gone gone through more copies than we care to remember we think we’ve got EITQM’s ticket. We think we know which stampers have the potential to sound good as well as the ones to avoid. Finding the right stampers has been a positive boon.

Once we discovered the right stampers we were in a much better position to hear just how well recorded the album is. Now we know beyond all doubt that this recording — the first without Ken Scott producing and engineering for this iteration of the band — is of the highest quality, in league with the best.

Until recently we would never have made such a bold statement. Now it’s nothing less than obvious.

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Dreamer Tells You What You Need to Know About this MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

This commentary was written about 2000, when the Speakers Corner pressing had just come out. We liked it back then, but I doubt we would care much for it now.

Listen to the vocals at the end of Dreamer.

If they are too bright, the bells at the end of the song sound super-extended and harmonically clear and clean.

But at what price? Now the vocals are too bright. Which is more important, good vocals or good bells?

There has to be balance. This is something audiophiles — and audiophile labels, who should obviously know better — seem to have difficulty appreciating.

We used to get these MoFis in on a regular basis, and they usually sound as phony and wrong as can be. They’re the perfect example of a hyped-up audiophile record that appeals to people with lifeless stereos, the kind that need amped-up records to get them to come to life.

I’ve been telling people for years that the MoFi was junk, and that they should get rid of their copy and replace it with a tonally correct version, easily done since there is a very good sounding Speakers Corner 180g reissue currently in print which does not suffer from the ridiculously boosted top end and bloated bass that characterizes the typical MoFi COTC pressing.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many Half-Speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lesson by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons so often turn out to be.

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way many of our older systems tended to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in a hurry.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

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Supertramp – Crime of the Century

More of the Music of Supertramp

  • Crime of the Century is back after a five month hiatus, here INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides of this vintage British pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy sold directly to one of our best customers for the highest price we’ve ever charged – $1000
  • Having played it and heard the album sound better than any other copy ever has, we think he got his money’s worth and then some
  • Ken Scott engineered this one to have Cinerama-sized height, width and depth to rival the best rock albums you’ve ever heard
  • Clearly their magnum opus, a great leap forward and a permanent member of our Rock & Pop Top 100 Album List
  • “The tuneful, tightly played songs, pristine clarity of sound, and myriad imaginative sound effects, helped create an album that Sounds magazine likened to ‘Genesis, The Beach Boys…a smattering of [Pink] Floyd.'”

This is engineer Ken Scott‘s (and the band’s) masterpiece, but the average copy sure can’t get your blood pumping the way this one will. We’ve long recognized that Crime of the Century is a true Demo Disc in the world of rock recordings; a member of our Rock & Pop Top 100 list right from the get go.

When you hear the guitars come jumping out of your speakers on “School” or “Bloody Well Right,” you can be sure that you’re playing a very special pressing of a very special recording indeed. (Yes, you need both. That’s why we’re here.)

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Breakfast in America – An A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This title is yet another Half-Speed we think belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I should know — my system in 1976 was one-tenth as revealing as the one we use now.

But this pressing is so awful even my old system would not be fooled by this kind of audiophile BS sound. The console you see pictured might be the ideal system to play it. Hard to say, I haven’t heard one of those since the 60s.

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

So washed out, brittle, thin and lifeless, it practically defies understanding that anyone with two working ears ever considered calling this piece of crap an “audiophile” record.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

If you don’t think the major labels had anything but contempt for audiophiles, play this pressing and see for yourself the kind of garbage they were happy to pawn off on a far-too-credulous audiophile “community.”

Speaking of the audiophile community, was there ever such a thing?

There is now of course, Hoffman’s being the most popular. On his forum you will find self-described audiophiles defending the indefensible at every turn. I am happy to report that the threads mentioning — sorry, I meant to say bashing — Hot Stampers are some of the most popular.

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