More of the Music of The Rolling Stones
Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers
One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Robert writes:
When we hear a truly great rock & roll record played back with the massive power and thrilling energy only such a record can deliver, what else can we do but turn the darn thing up! In my view, this is the litmus test for most records, and nearly every rock record. If we’re not inclined to want to hear it even bigger and louder, then I can’t help think, why bother?
And the fact is, some records need to be played loud for us to dive deeper into the mix and fully grasp the size and scale of the recording. That is, if we can find a copy that will let us in in the first place.
But when we do have the right copy of a record that’s well recorded and well mastered, and we’ve built and tweaked our stereo and room to be up to the task of playing it, turning the knob a bit further can indeed make a great rock record a thing to behold. We can find ourselves not just seeing into the recording, but even feeling like we’re in it ourselves.
In my recent article on anti-skate I discussed how, even when you think this and other settings on your turntable are right, you may eventually play a record that will show you otherwise. In my case, I could tell something wasn’t right with my system, but I wasn’t really sure what it was until I played a record that should have sounded fantastic but didn’t. That’s when I realized, for reasons I explain in the article, that it was time to readjust my anti-skate.
Click below to see how just how good a Hot Stamper pressing of Sticky Fingers can work as a test record for table setup.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone or any group of individuals could possibly have played as many copies of Sticky Fingers as we have. It must be close to a hundred by now. That would be my best guess. We do shootouts for the album about twice a year, which is as often as the supply of clean originals we can find makes possible.
(We even played the new Half-Speed cut at Abbey Road, review coming soon.)
The picture you see nearby was taken many years ago, circa 2005 I would guess, just as we were preparing to do our first shootout for the album.
That shootout turned out to be a bust. Without the Walker record cleaning fluids and a number of dramatic improvements we made to our front end in the ensuing years, the copies of Sticky Fingers we had on hand back then were just too noisy, and many of them were very crude sounding.
(An equally famous record we tried to shootout in 2005 was also a bust. And I’ve never taken the time to write about the three days I spent playing Houses of the Holy around the same time with nothing to show for it. Same problems: the improperly cleaned vinyl was too noisy and the system was not good enough to bring out the best in the top copies.)
Eventually we achieved the technological breakthroughs that were necessary in order to be able to clean and play Sticky Fingers properly. Sticky Fingers is a tough record to get to sound good, let alone really good, as Robert Brook can tell you.
It’s a challenge for any system, regardless of cost.
“The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.” – Epictetus
More to the point, it’s an extremely challenging recording that offers the advanced audiophile a precision tool for dialing in his setup on a modern, high quality turntable.
By ear! Can’t forget that part. Nothing is more important than learning to do everything in audio by ear.
Even when a record has been been reprocessed from mono into stereo, it can still sound very good. Not the best, mind you, but good enough to easily wipe the floor with anything pressed by any audiophile label that we’ve ever heard of, and we’ve heard pretty much all of them.
