Top Artists – The Rolling Stones

The Turn of a Screw Gets Sticky Fingers Sounding Right

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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.

Getting AZIMUTH Right Lets You SEE INTO the Recording!

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.

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The Rolling Stones – Dirty Work

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 More Rock and Pop

  • An original domestic pressing with seriously good sound from start to finish
  • These sides had the presence, bass, and dynamics that were missing from most other copies we played
  • “…a handful of songs have a spry, vigorous attack – ‘One Hit (To the Body)’ is a classic, and ‘Winning Ugly’ and ‘Had It With You’ have a similar aggression.”

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The Rolling Stones – Undercover

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More Rock and Pop

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) sound throughout, this vintage pressing will be very hard to beat – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • These sides are BIGGER and RICHER and have more of the rock solid energy that’s missing from the average copy
  • If you know Chris Kimseys engineering work from Some Girls, Tattoo You, Frampton Comes Alive and the like, then you should have a good idea of what this album sounds like on the better copies
  • “As the Rolling Stones’ most ambitious album since Some Girls, Undercover is a weird, wild mix of hard rock, new wave pop, reggae, dub, and soul. [A] fascinating record…”

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Sticky Fingers – A Quick Test

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Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers

The best copies have texture and real dynamics in the brass. The bad copies are smeared, grainy and unpleasant when the brass comes in.

Toss those bad ones and start shooting out the good ones.

Believe me, if you find a good one it will be worth all the work.


One customer observed that the recording was “deliberately a bit muddy and smeared…” and he was mostly right about that. We replied as follows;

You are spot on with your observation about the sound being deliberately muddy.

Glyn Johns loves his tube compressors. They can make some tracks murkier than many of us would like, but they work positive wonders most of the time.

A lot of the smearing you reference is from uncleaned or improperly cleaned vinyl. Once we got our cleaning regimen dialed in, a lot of the smear we used to hear so often stopped being a problem.

3-Dimensionality also greatly improves with clean, fully restored vinyl. A lot of old records just sound like old records until you learn how to clean them right.

Play It Loud

Even through the noise of the bad vinyl you can hear the audio magic. The sound is exactly what you want from a Stones album: deep punchy bass and dynamic grungy guitars. This record is to be played loud like it says on the inner sleeve and the surface noise is to be ignored. The louder you play it, the less bothersome the noise will be. This album ROCKS and it was not made to be listened to in a comfy chair with a glass of wine.


Further Reading

The Rolling Stones – Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!

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  • This boxed Decca UK pressing boasts superb Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • Remarkably quiet vinyl too – for those of you who prize audiophile quality surfaces, you are unlikely to see a quieter copy with grades this good hit the site again for a very long while
  • With rock and roll energy and you-are-there presence, turn this one up good and loud and you will find yourself at the Stones concert of a lifetime
  • The live performances of “Sympathy For The Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” and “Honky Tonk Woman” are MAGICAL from these shows – the Stones in 1970 were taking their music to a whole new level
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Recorded during their American tour in late 1969, and centered around live versions of material from the Beggars Banquet-Let It Bleed era… Often acclaimed as one of the top live rock albums of all time…”

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The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue

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  • Boasting solid Double Plus (A++) grades throughout, this superb pressing is guaranteed to blow the doors off any other Emotional Rescue you’ve heard – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • “Dance (Pt. 1)” and “She’s So Cold” sound great on this copy, and the title track, “Emotional Rescue,” is every bit as good
  • An underrated Stones album – too good to call a guilty pleasure – and very well-recorded by Chris Kimsey
  • Maybe it’s good because “Mick Jagger sounds like he’s having a great time…” – Eric Klinger, PopMatters.com

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The Rolling Stones – Their Satanic Majesties Request

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Reviews and Commentaries for Their Satanic Majesties Request

  • You’ll find superb Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage British Decca pressing
  • Their one and only psychedelic album, one that came out right before the raging bluesy rock of Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers
  • This is some crazy Stones music, with loads of psychedelic madness, balanced by a good number of catchy tunes
  • It’s a lot of fun on a pressing that sounds as good as this one, with the space, clarity and richness that vintage vinyl offers in such abundance (particularly on side one)
  • Every one of the original Decca stereo pressings we’ve played has come up short against these recuts from the Seventies – if you want an original on this album, the one with the cool lenticular 3-D cover, just know that you’re choosing second-rate sound (which, of course, is your choice)
  • 4 stars: “Never before or since did the Stones take so many chances in the studio… a fascinating anomaly in the group’s discography”.

This is the Stones at their most experimental, so there are plenty of strange effects and trippy arrangements. Only the best copies manage to make sense of it, but when you find one this music is a lot of fun.

If you’re looking for the raging bluesy rock of Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed, you’ll find some of that here but also a lot of psychedelia too. You do get some great rockers though — “Citadel,” “2000 Man,” and “2000 Light Years From Home” to name a few. “She’s A Rainbow” is the poppiest song here, and on this copy it sounds WONDERFUL.

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The Rolling Stones – Mono or Reprocessed Stereo?

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Important Lessons We Learned from Record Experiments

On this London LP, even though it states clearly on the cover that the record is electronically re-processed into stereo, the songs we heard on side one were in dead mono.

So much for believing what you read on album covers.

This Sonny Rollins pressing of Tenor Madness says it too has been remastered into stereo, but you would have a hard time hearing any left-right information coming from your speakers. On headphones, maybe, but speakers? Unlikely.

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.


Mono, Stereo, Reprocessed Stereo, We’ve Played Them All!

Mono or Stereo? Both Can Be Good

Mono or Stereo? Stick with Mono

Mono or Stereo? Stick with Stereo

Mono Reprocessed into Stereo – Good and Bad

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The Rolling Stones / Through The Past Darkly Has Surprisingly Good Sound

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More Compilation Albums with the Potential for Very Good Sound

This is a Decca In The Box Blue Label LP with EXCELLENT SOUND! Some of the tracks here sound WONDERFUL, but even more surprisingly, none of them sound bad the way so many Stones compilations do.

Virtually nowhere on this record can you find shrill, thin, edgy, typical compilation Stones sound.

Playing songs like ‘She’s a Rainbow’ or ‘Dandelion’ on this album is so refreshing and enjoyable because they really sound the way you want to hear them. They have that rich and sweet analog quality that’s usually lost on later and/or digital versions.

The best sounding tracks on side one are track two; track three (silky vocals and deep bass); track five (big sound — a bit bright but ALIVE and tons of fun); and track six.

The best sounding tracks on side two are track two (as good as it gets); track four (the same); and track six, with plenty of cowbell. Side two is characterized by perfect top to bottom tonality and lots of energy.

“The U.K. version of this album was a bit odder yet more rewarding than its American counterpart. Apart from the superior sound, the major difference lies in the range of songs…” – AMG (more…)

Letter of the Week – “This one is great; involving, NOT smeared, 3D — most of all it invites me in…”

More of the Music of The Rolling Stones

Reviews and Commentaries for Sticky Fingers

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

Hey Tom, 

I bought the Sticky you suggested (seemed like a dare). Like I said, I have several pressings, including the horrible MFSL. This sounds better than all of them, by far. My sense is that it’s a tough album, deliberately a bit muddy and smeared and inconsistent from track to track, which made the quest even more appealing. This one is great; involving, NOT smeared, 3D — most of all it invites me in, instead of saying “OK, this may be a bit cloudy, but try to enjoy anyway.”

I’m on my 5th listen. And Catch Bull at Four is also seriously good. Such an underrated album. I’ll be back, inasmuch as most of my other vinyl sounds flaccid compared to these.

John

John,

Thanks for your letter. You are spot on with your observation about the sound being deliberately muddy.

Glyn Johns loves his tube compressors. They can make some tracks murkier than many of us would like, but they work positive wonders most of the time.

A lot of the smearing you reference is from uncleaned or improperly cleaned vinyl. Once we got our cleaning regimen dialed in, a lot of the smear we used to hear so often on old records stopped being a problem.

3-Dimensionality also greatly improves with clean, fully restored vinyl. A lot of old records just sound like old records until you learn how to clean them right.