Top Artists – The Moody Blues

Yes, It Certainly Is a Question of Balance

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

Recently we played an early UK pressing that boasted two seriously good sounding sides.

It was huge and spacious, as well as wonderfully Tubey Magical. To our way of thinking, if that isn’t exactly the way the band wanted to sound in 1970, we can’t imagine what would be.

A Question of Balance has some of the best Moody Blues sound we’ve ever heard – it’s a truly exceptional recording in their canon. And it includes the big hit “Question,” one of the all time greats by the band.

Achieving just the right balance of “Moody Blues Sound” and transparency is no mean feat.

  • You have to be using the real master tape for starters.
  • Then you need top end extension, a very rare quality on these imports.
  • Finally, you need good bass definition to keep the bottom end from blurring and bleeding into the midrange.

No domestic copy in our experience has ever had these three qualities, and only the best of the British imports (no Dutch, German or Japanese need apply) manages to get all three on the same LP.

Allow me to steal some commentary from a Moody Blues Hot Stamper shootout we did years ago, for the wonderful In Search of the Lost Chord, in which we said that, on the best Hot Stamper pressings, the clarity and resolution come without sacrificing the Tubey Magical richness, warmth and lushness for which Moody Blues recordings are justifiably famous.

Typically

Moody Blues albums are typically murky, congested and dull. Listening to the typical copy you’d be forgiven for blaming the band or the recording engineer for the problem, but copies like this tell a different story.

Of course the album is never going to have the kind of super clean, high-rez sound some audiophiles prize, but that’s clearly not what the Moody Blues were aiming for. It isn’t about picking out individual parts or deciphering the machinery of the music with this band.

It’s all about lush, massive soundscapes, and for that this is the kind of sound that works the best.

Domestic Moody Blues LPs

If you’ve ever done a shootout between domestic pressings of the Moody Blues and good imports, you know that the imports just kill the American LPs. Domestic pressings are cut from sub-generation tapes, which means they tend to sound more smeary, yet they’re also thinner, brighter and more transistory.

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Comparing the Speakers Corner, MoFi, and a Super Hot Stamper

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased a while ago. [Bolding and italics added.]

Hey Tom, 

Just thought I’d drop you a line on the two albums I just received yesterday. I had some free time on my hands today so I was able to do some comparisons.

I have an original Days of Future Passed, which sounds about as dull as they come.

I have that reissue I bought from you years ago [no doubt the Speakers Corner Heavy Vinyl pressing] and the MoFi.

The reissue was pleasing to the ear but lacked that lifeforce which makes listening to records so involving.

The MoFi was always my favorite, but with this Super Hot Stamper I was hearing the whole recording studio.

There was a lot more depth and realism which I didn’t hear in the other records.

The Level 42 World Machine was always a fun record to listen to. The CD was just bright and bass heavy, so I bought an import lp off you years ago. It sounded pretty good until you turned it up, then it became so shrill I had to turn it back down.

The Super Hot Stamper sounds great and I can turn it up as loud as I want.

The sound stage is deep and believable which for an 80’s record is a rarity.

That Simply Red Picture Book Super Hot Stamper I purchased last year was a gem also.

Shane

Shane,

Thanks so much for your letter.

If you have an original domestic pressing, you definitely have a dull record. It’s made from a dub tape and sounds smeary and dark. This is, of course, the one we all owned back in the day unless you were one of those crazy people who ordered imported pressings from your local record store and waited weeks if not months for them to show up from across the sea.

The Speakers Corner pressing I used to sell was a good record, not a great one. (It was made from the remixed tapes since the masters had long ago been damaged or lost.)

Like many of their reissues, it was tonally correct, something most Heavy Vinyl pressings could not claim to be.

The MoFi I used to like somewhat. No idea what I would think of it now. Phony up top I’m guessing.  I can’t think of a single Stan Ricker-mastered MoFi title that doesn’t have a boosted top end, so the chances of Days of Future Passed being the exception are remote.

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The Moody Blues – Seventh Sojourn

More of The Moody Blues

Reviews and Commentaries for The Moody Blues

  • Seventh Sojourn is back on the site for only the second time in thirteen months, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides of this original Threshold pressing
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • Forget the dubby domestic pressings and whatever crappy Heavy Vinyl record they’re making these days – the UK LPs are the only way to fly
  • Great sound isn’t easy to come by for the Moody Blues – it takes a lot of copies to find sound as good as this
  • The Moodies’ biggest success on the American charts – “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock & Roll Band)” is the killer hit from the album
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you

This pressing is excellent on both sides. It has lovely vocals — sweet and breathy — so critical to the Moodies sound. It’s also spacious and energetic, two qualities that the average copy simply has very little of. To top it all off, this copy rocks about as much as this album, in our experience, CAN rock. Most pressings are shockingly compressed, recessed and murky.

And the domestic copies are made from dubs; they’re brighter but grainy and transistory as hell. They convey NONE of the Moodies magic.

Moody Blues records have a marked tendency to sound somewhat murky and muddy; that’s obviously the sound these guys were going for because you hear it on every album they released.

Compound their “sound” with bad mastering, bad pressing or bad vinyl — not to mention vinyl that hasn’t been cleaned properly — and you will find yourself trying to wade through an impassable sonic swamp. With anything but a Hot Stamper the result is going to be sound so fat, thick, and opaque that it will confound any attempt you might make to hear into it. (more…)

The Moody Blues – To Our Children’s Children’s Children

More of The Moody Blues

More Psych Rock

  • An early UK Threshold pressing with lush but clear Tubey Magical Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • You get richness, fullness and warmth on both of these sides, which is exactly what you want for the Moodies’ music
  • We shot out a number of other imports and this one had the presence, bass, and dynamics that were missing from most other copies we played
  • “It is the fourth of what are popularly considered the group’s “core seven” (or Classic Seven) albums from 1967 to 1972, and as such represents the peak of their career to some.”
  • “There are no extended suites on this album, but Justin Hayward’s ‘Watching and Waiting’ and ‘Gypsy’ have proved to be among the most popular songs in the group’s history.”

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To Our Children’s Children’s Children on Mobile Fidelity Anadisc

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

We here present yet another MoFi pressing that we played and found seriously wanting.

Pure Anadisc murky mud, like all the Moody Blues records MoFi remastered and ruined in the ’90s with their misbegotten foray back into the world of vinyl. By 1999 they were bankrupt and deservedly so.

Their records were completely worthless to those of us who play them and want to hear them sound good but, unsurprisingly, a quick search on ebay indicates that they’re still worth money to the audiophile types who collect the kind of trash this label put out.

Folks, seriously, you really have to work at it to find pressings of the Moody Blues albums that sound worse than the ones MoFi did in the ’90s.

To be honest, we really don’t know of any. Which means that, as far as we’re concerned, their pressing of To Our Children’s Children’s Children is the worst version of the album ever made.

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