Bruce Botnick, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Dave Mason – Alone Together (Marble Vinyl)

More of the Music of Dave Mason

  • Mason’s Masterpiece (on marble vinyl!) returns to the site after a three and a half year hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage Blue Thumb pressing
  • Listen to how big and rich the dynamic chorus gets on the first track, “Only You Know and I Know” – what a thrill to hear it like that
  • A killer Bruce Botnick recording – Tubey Magical analog, smooth and natural, with the whole production sitting on a rock solid bottom-end foundation
  • Our latest shootout was a tough one – we actually had three winning copies but this was the only one with issues that weren’t significant enough to prevent it from being listed on the site
  • We do this shootout about once every ten years, and every time we do it, the best sounding copies, always on marble vinyl, are often too noisy to sell — next stop, 2035!
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Alone Together represents Dave Mason at his peak… everything comes together perfectly.”

*NOTE: There is a stitch that plays as a very light and intermittent swoosh throughout all of side 1, audible only in the quiet parts (of which there are few). It then plays at a moderate level during the intro to the last track, “Shouldn’t Have Took More Than You Gave.”

Before I get too far into the story of the sound, I want to say that this album appears to be criminally underrated as music nowadays, having fallen from favor with the passage of time.

It is a surely a Masterpiece that belongs in any rock collection worthy of the name. (Others that belong in that category can be found here.) Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s no filler here.

This Copy Rocks

Punchy and surprisingly deep bass is one of the first things you will notice when playing one of these Hot Stamper copies. Huge amounts of ambience fill out the space that extends from wall to wall (and all the way to the back of the studio), leaving plenty of room around each of the players.

Full-bodied sound, open and spacious, bursting with life and energy; presence in both the lead and backup vocals (so critical to the presentation of this kind of Folk Rock); not to mention harmonically rich acoustic guitars that ring for days — these are the hallmarks of our hottest Hot Stampers.

Listen to how big and rich the dynamic chorus gets on the first track, “World in Changes.” What a thrill. Any shortcomings in the sound will be instantly obvious on this chorus. It managed to stay as clear and uncongested as any we had ever heard.

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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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Letter of the Week – “I have been listening to a first pressing Decca, but your copy made it sound egregiously insipid.”

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Rolling Stones Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

This LET IT BLEED is a gorgeous monster. Everything just jumps off the page, so to speak. I have been listening to a first pressing Decca, which I have owned for years, but your copy made it sound egregiously insipid. As I kept turning up the volume, the room seemed to be nodding its head and egging me on to keep increasing it. I never reached the point where too much was too much. Great copy.

The Mahavishnu EMERALD was brilliant. It brought out all the exciting dimensions of my system. The exquisite strings floated above the musical melee which tattooed its obligato deliriously across its raucous underbelly. The sound reached out like tongues of flame making the speakers completely disappear in their rocking wake.

This is an amazing record that projects and dances the music in every direction and then some. Everything is alive. So completely alive. A real treat. A great recording that tells me my system is completely responsive.

Phil

Phil,

We’ve known for a very long time — since roughly 2005 — what an awful pressing the original mono Decca is of the album.

When we last heard one, it did not evn pass the laugh test, and we never bought another.

Even the original Decca stereo pressings of the album are not that good, and at the prices being charged these days, a very poor choice if you want the best sound.

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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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An Overview of The Soft Parade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Our vintage Doors pressings — either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else will do — have the kind of Tubey Magical midrange that modern records are almost never able to reproduce.

Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

One of The Records That Did It For Me

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back over the last forty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with scores of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile in the first place, and stuck with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music you love sound so good?

It’s clearly an album we are obsessed with. We have written extensively about quite a number of them to date. It is our contention that to be any good at this hobby, you have to become obsessed with well-recorded albums and work out the consequences of those obsessions for yourself.

The Soft Parade was one of those albums that blew my fifteen-year-old mind. Songs for Beginners was another one.

We also wrote about the subject of being obsessed with music here. An excerpt:

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Letter of the Week – “Holy smokes, the 3/3 copy transforms the musical experience.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

A letter from a good customer tells of his experience playing a top copy of the album.

Hi Guys,

Just when I thought you guys could not surprise me, you did it again. Morrison Hotel was not in my collection when I was growing up although I was familiar with some of the tracks on the album. I picked up a SHS 2/1.5 copy; it was good and I added it to my collection. I saw the WHS 3/3 copy come up on the site and thought I would give it a try because of my past experience (Jackson Browne, Beatles – White Album, Crowded House).

Holy smokes, my intuition was correct: the 3/3 copy transforms the musical experience. I don’t know how or why this happens; how a SHS side 2 that sounds good goes exponentially up with a WHS 3 copy; it just does. When one gets a WHS 3/3 in single album as opposed to a 2 pack; it is a musical treat beyond compare. Thanks as usual.

Mike

Mike, I have had that experience quite often, hundreds of times in fact. The 3+ takes the music to a place no other copy can take it, and it takes you with it. This is why we do shootouts, and why you must do them too, if owning the highest quality pressings is important to you.

Shootouts are the only way to answer the most important question in all of audio: “compared to what?”

Without shootouts, how can you begin to know the specific characteristics of the sound of the pressings you own?

We write a lot about that subject, and here is a bit of an overview that we think our readers will find helpful.

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Letter of the Week – “This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

You’ve blown my mind yet again. This copy of Morrison Hotel is SO HUGE and CLEAN and DYNAMIC… I’m just glad I didn’t blow up my hi-fi; there should’ve been a warning label!

Best,

Ben

Ben,

You are right about that. This album is powerful like few others we have the pleasure to play regularly.

This is Demo Disc quality sound by any measure, especially on big speakers at loud levels.

You’ve got to hand it to Bruce Botnick — he knows how to get real rock-’em, sock-’em bottom end onto a piece of magnetic tape.

And sometimes that bottom end whomp* actually makes it onto the record, as is the case here, making for one helluva demo disc for bass (if you have speakers big enough to play it, of course.)

Waiting for the Sun

The track to play to hear massive amounts of bass and energy is one we should all know well: Waiting for the Sun.

If you’re looking for Demo Quality song on this album, that’s the one. Prodigious amounts of Tubey Magic as well.

*For whomp factor, the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp.

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Eddie Money – One and Done

A Well Recorded Album that Should Be More Popular with Audiophiles

More Debut Albums of Interest

This is clearly Eddie Money’s best sounding album. Roughly 100 other listings for the Best Sounding Album by an Artist or Group can be found here.

In our opinion, his debut is the only Eddie Money record you’ll ever need. Click on this link to see more titles we like to call One and Done

The average copy is way too compressed, which kills the top end (by making the cymbals aggressive) and the vocals too midrangy. When you’ve got a copy of Eddie Money’s debut that’s doing what it’s supposed to do, you know pretty quickly. The highs are sweet and extended, the vocals are present, but without any spit or strain, and there is solid bass and low end propelling everything forward.

Eddie Money has only made one good record in our opinion — this one. Fortunately, it’s a GREAT one and we don’t have to play any of his others. This guy had so much promise, based solely on his debut here. He lost his brilliant guitarist and arranger, Jimmy Lyon, soon after this first album was made, and that may account for his slide into mediocrity.

But this record is outstanding from first note to last. If at the end of the second track — a cover of You Really Got A Hold On Me — you are not rockin’ out, then Eddie Money is just not for you. I love this album and I played it countless times back in the day.

This album checks off a few of our favorite boxes:

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