Top Artists – The Doors

The Doors – Alive, She Cried

More of the Music of The Doors

  • An original copy of the 1983 release of The Doors’ second official live album, here with STUNNING Shootout Winning Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This pressing has the kind of powerful low end that lets the wild music of the live Doors really take off
  • “Gloria” and “Little Red Rooster,” in particular, sound exceptionally good – big, lively and immediate
  • Recorded at concerts from 1968 to 1970 in Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Boston and Copenhagen

The recordings here come from different concerts, so naturally some songs sound better than others. “Gloria” and “Little Red Rooster” are probably the best sounding songs on here, and that works out well because The Doors are on fire for those two numbers!

Many copies we played lacked bass in a big way, but this one’s got a strong bottom end that lets the music work. The sound is richer and fuller than most of what we heard elsewhere. Many copies were so clean that they sounded like CDs.

This pressing really communicates the energy of a Doors concert, which is exactly what we want from a live album. The clarity, presence, transparency, and energy are all outstanding on this original pressing.

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We Get Letters – “That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

A customer wrote the following to us not long ago:

Recently I fired up my CD circuit, which does not happen very often.

Once the system was warmed up I played some MoFi gold CDs.

Nothing special, but I did like the Yes Fragile CD. Actually enjoyed it.

Guns and Roses Appetite was nasty…

Supertramp Breakfast was nasty…

Enough of that. Then I read your blog on the Doors LA Woman DCC gold CD. Found I have it!

Played the whole thing and I wanted more of it. That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.

Dear Sir,

Steve did a great job on L.A. Woman, let me be the first to say. Of course the real thing on vinyl is even better, but it’s a great way to test how good your front end is, assuming you have a killer copy of the vinyl, something that is very unlikely to be the case but something that cannot be ruled out entirely. (Tell me your stamper numbers and I will tell you if you are close.)

I worked through a lot of changes to my system in the 90s and 2000s partly because I had CDs that sounded better in some ways than my vinyl versions of them.

That never happens now, but it took me 20 years to get there!

For example, in the early 2000s this title did not sound as good as the CD until I got rid of all my tube equipment and discovered the life-changing sound of the EAR 324P, the Dynavector 17d and a lot more. The transient attack of the drums and cymbals went from “well recorded — it’s a direct to disc, what did you expect?” to suddenly sounding like real drums you might hear if you were sitting right in front of the kit in a small club.

(I recently took a trip to Nashville and had a chance to see and hear more than a dozen drum kits on the main boulevard. There seemed to be one in every club, facing inwards with the glass of the window removed to give the passers by a taste of what was in store for them inside. Standing three feet from a guy banging a drum kit is something that can teach you a lot about sound, mostly by showing you the enormous gulf that separates live sound from recorded sound in the most audiophile systems.)

That CD of The Three showed me what I had been missing — the presence, dynamics, and most importantly speed and complete freedom from smear of any kind on any instrument. It changed many of my ideas about audio in the most fundamental ways imaginable. Nothing in my audio world was the same after that.

Of the many audio breakthroughs I’ve undergone in the fifty years I’ve been pursuing audio , I might be inclined to put this one right at the top of the list.

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The Doors – Absolutely Live

More of  the Music of The Doors

  • These vintage Elektra pressings boast STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • Recorded at concerts in 1969 and 1970, this double-LP set features two original songs – the haunting “Universal Mind” and the blues-rocker “Build Me a Woman” – not found on any of studio albums, as well as extended versions of “Soul Kitchen,” “Break On Through,” and “When the Music’s Over”
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock albums – those on “The Celebration Of The Lizard” are especially bad – but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
  • If you’re a fan of the band, their live album from 1970 surely belongs in your collection

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Letter of the Week – “I’m so blown away with this Hot Stamper that I think it’s a bargain at $500.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Hi Tom,

I must confess, that like most audiophiles, I was not a believer in Hot Stampers. I thought my DCC Compact Classic and my 180 gram Box Set was the best. Boy was I dead wrong!

I have been buying Hot Stampers from you on a regular basis for the past two months. They truly allow me to hear what was intended in the recording studio and, man, is it breathtaking.

I received the Doors – LA Woman a couple of days ago and never in my wildest dreams did I ever think a record could be this realistic.

I couldn’t believe the amount of information I was hearing coming out of the groove of this LP — the biggest, most realistic staging and largest acoustic space I have ever heard in my life.

The highs were sweet and extended, the midrange was as natural as a midrange could ever be, and the bass was tight and rich with incredible weight down to the lowest region. Transparency and resolution on this LP are simply out of this world. I’m so blown away with this Hot Stamper that I think it’s a bargain at $500.00.

I truly believe you really have to experience a Hot Stamper, especially one like this, to see why I’m losing my mind. I’m slowly but surely replacing all of my favorite records with your Hot Stamper versions.

Thank you for this masterpiece! (more…)

L.A. Woman Is a Disaster on German Heavy Vinyl, Part One

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

There was a German 180 gram pressing of L.A. Woman that was so bad, I called this commentary from 2005 The Audiophile Apocalypse. [Minor edits have been made since then.]

The fact that some audiophiles and audiophile reviewers appeared to like this pressing was a sign that, to me at least, The End Is Near, or May Be. There is no hope for audiophiles if they can’t tell a good record from a bad one, and this is clearly a bad one.

If this isn’t a good example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

As noted at the top, this commentary was written a long time ago. Much of our thinking about the recordings of The Doors has evolved since then, having played scores of their records in shootouts and learned something new from practically each one. Click here to read more.

Dateline: January, 2005

When I first played it I thought there must be something wrong with my stereo. There was no deep bass. (This recording has amazing deep bass.) The sound was upper midrangey and distorted. There was no extreme top at all.

This surprised me, as I had heard that this was supposed to be a good record.

What I heard coming off the copy that I was playing was pure garbage. I was confused.

So I grabbed a couple of DCC Doors pressings. The first one I played was Waiting For The Sun, my favorite on DCC. Ahh, that’s more like it. Sweet, open, plenty of bass, extended highs, Steve Hoffman’s beautifully liquid midrange — everything I expected to hear on his version was there just exactly the way it should be.

So I knew it wasn’t my stereo. Then I pulled out the DCC LA Woman. What’s the difference you ask? Well, the DCC has a top end. Listen to the cymbals. They ring sweetly and correctly. You can hear that the tape hiss sounds correct, a sure sign that the top end is accurate.

The midrange is a bit recessed compared to the German pressing. Steve says he took out a half DB in the upper mids. There’s distortion on the vocals and he was trying to soften the effect. It might have been better to leave it flat, but either way is preferable to the boosted, aggressive, edgy upper midrange to be found on the German pressing.

The German LP sounds like something playing over the radio. AM, not FM. Part of the problem is that there’s no lower midrange on the German pressing to properly balance out the vocals. Perhaps it’s not on the tape they used. I’m guessing it probably isn’t.

But any mastering engineer worthy of the name should know how to fix a problem like that. Steve did. Apparently this German fellow did not.

And worst of all, there is no deep bass on this record AT ALL. The whole lower octave is missing. Now to be fair, the DCC LP has the same problem. There’s no lower bass on it either. That’s why I don’t recommend that you listen to LA Woman on vinyl. I don’t know of any copy that sounds right.

UPDATE 2025

This was true in 2005 because we had yet to do the work it takes to find the right copies, the ones with plenty of bass and everything else too. I think it took us another ten years to find the pressings with the right stampers. Scroll to the bottom of this listing to see our notes for the copy that won our last shootout in 2024.

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These Are the Stampers to Avoid on The Doors’ Debut

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

In our experience, the Gold Label stereo originals with 1B/1B stampers are terrible sounding.

With 1B stampers it’s bad enough to go into our hall of shame for vintage pressings.

(Bad sounding audiophile records, being so plentiful, especially these days, have their own hall of shame.)

No surprise there; it’s just another bad sounding original pressing that ended up doing poorly in one of our shootouts.

We’ve auditioned countless pressings like this one in the 37 years we’ve been in business — buying, cleaning and playing them by the thousands. This is how we find the best sounding vinyl pressings ever made.

Not the ones that should sound the best. The ones that actually do sound the best.

If you’re an audiophile looking for top quality sound on vintage vinyl, we’d be happy to send you the Hot Stamper pressing guaranteed to beat anything and everything you’ve heard, especially if you have any pressing marketed as suitable for an audiophile. Those, with very few exceptions, are the worst.

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The Strings on Wishful Sinful Are a Tough Test

The Soft Parade is a tragically underrated album and a killer recording, with Demo Quality sound on the best pressings

A new test we found helpful on side two was the quality of the strings on Wishful Sinful.

Man, they can really get edgy and shrill on some copies. The best side two’s have them sounding high-rez, rosiny and (almost) smooth.

No two copies of an album will get those strings to sound the same. If you don’t believe us just pull out two copies and listen for yourself. You may be in for quite a shock. You can adjust your VTA (you can and should) until you find the maximum resolution, most body, most harmonic extension, as well as the most correct tonality on the strings, but after you do, you will still never get two different pressings to sound the same.

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Letter of the Week – “So I know in my head what the AP 45 sounds like. It’s basically all I know…. except that I know I don’t ‘feel Jim’s rage’ on any of the AP 45 LPs.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Hi Tom,

What an incredible experience. I’ve never had anything close to an original of this one. Having heard some songs way too much on the radio didn’t help. I wound up with the AP 45, which compared to whatever I had, was better.

So I know in my head what the AP 45 sounds like. It’s basically all I know…. except that I know I don’t ‘feel Jim’s rage’ on any of the AP 45 LPs.

When I saw you guys had a copy, and it was a top notch one to boot, I was like, dude, you’ve gotta pull the trigger now without delay. What a terrific decision that was!

Raw, powerful, energetic, lively, warm, punchy, dynamic, begging for top volume, tonal qualities of Jim’s vocals absolutely perfect, effortless, you could turn it up to a thousand and it wouldn’t hurt your ears.

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After 40 Years, Waiting for the Sun Comes Full Circle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

This commentary was written in 2008, shortly after playing an amazingly magical Gold Label pressing in a shootout.

My favorite of the first three Doors album, Waiting for the Sun is imbued with more mystery and lyricism than previous efforts. The album shows them maturing as a band, smoking large amounts of pot and preparing for the wild ride of their next opus, the ambitious, controversial The Soft Parade.

Actually, as I listen to this album, it reminds me more and more of that one. Now that it sounds as good as The Soft Parade, I find I’ve gained a new respect for Waiting.

More to Come

I started playing these albums in high school on my 8-track tape player. My older stepbrother had the records and I probably played those too.

When I seriously got into audio sometime in the ’70s, I tried every kind of record I could get my hands on — Brits, Germans, Japanese, originals, reissues — but no matter what I did, I couldn’t find good sounding pressings of their albums. Everything I played sounded terrible and I just assumed the band, like so many other ’60s artists, had been poorly recorded.

Then in the early 80s, the MoFi pressing of the first album came out. It sounded amazing to me at the time.

Ten or so years later the DCC pressing on Heavy Vinyl came along and showed me how wrong I — and it — were.

Now we’ve come full circle — back to the right originals. (The operative word there is “right”; some early stampers are terrible. We know, we’ve played them.)

With better cleaning technologies and much better playback equipment, the tables have turned.

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The Doors / The Soft Parade

More of the Music of The Doors

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Doors

  • A Soft Parade like you’ve never heard, with seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this vintage Elektra pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in fifteen months)
  • Side one was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • If this price seems high, keep in mind that the top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1500
  • The sound is rich and lively, with solid brass and punchy drums – thanks, Bruce Botnick, where would The Doors be without you?
  • Full of great songs: “Touch Me,” “Runnin’ Blue,” “Wild Child,” “Wishful Sinful” and the amazingly trippy “Soft Parade” extended suite
  • “Much like a true ‘parade’ of an English fugue, the song morphs from Morrison’s a capella sermon-like intro to a Baroque ballad to a show tune-like section to the long rock outro, the music masterfully following the flowing, stream of consciousness lyric.” Hell yeah!
  • We’ve written extensively about The Soft Parade, and you can find quite a number of letters and commentaries for the album on this blog.
  • It’s my favorite by the group and one that was instrumental in helping me progress in this exasperating hobby we have chosen for ourselves.
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for The Soft Parade.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

This Doors pressing (either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else would qualify as a Hot Stamper) has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

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