Geoff Emerick, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Even In The Quietest Moments and Your 1977 Ears – There’s No Going Back

supereveni_1506_1x

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

By 1977 I was a huge fan of the band, having first discovered their music on Crisis (1975) and Crime (1974), in which order I honestly can’t remember.

I played their albums all the time, especially Crisis.

The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have been Crime of the Century by Mobile Fidelity, which came out in 1978.

Every right-thinking audiophile had that one — MoFi sold over a hundred thousand of them (along with a hundred thousand of Aja, Touch and one or two others).

And why not? The sound was killer on the systems of the day. Lots of slam down low (but not really that low, although it seemed plenty low at the time), lots of extra top up high, lots of phony detail, just what the old school stereos of the day, like mine, needed.

Crisis? What Crisis? followed in 1975. It was the Supertramp album that sent me over the top. I played that album relentlessly. Before long Art Rock was at the top of my list anytime I wanted to have an immersive musical experience, and that, for an obsessive audiophile like myself, meant almost every day.

Supertramp, Yes, Roxy Music, 10cc, Eno, Crack the Sky, ELO, Bowie – it’s all I wanted to listen to back then, and it encouraged me to keep upgrading my equipment whenever I had the money, although I admit to being completely clueless about all of that at the time. More on that subject here.

A year and a half later EITQM followed. It too became a staple of my musical diet. Man, I played that record till the grooves were worn smooth.

I thought the sound of my domestic pressing was killer at the time, too. Crisis was a demo disc at my house and this was right up there with it. Now the obvious question is, did I have a good sounding copy, or did my stereo not reveal to me the shortcomings of my LP? Or maybe my ears were not well enough trained to hear what was wrong.

Those of you who have been doing this for a long time know the answer: any or all of the above, probably all, and nobody can know just how much of each.

And there is no way to find out because you are not that person anymore.

Your 1977 Ears… and Mine

Even if you could recreate your old stereo and room, and find your original copy, there’s one thing you can’t do, and that’s listen to it with your 1977 ears.

Every time you play a record and listen to it critically, your ears get better at their job.

(more…)

Three Tracks Are Key on Supertramp’s Fifth Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

On the best copies of Even in the Quietest Moments the bottom end is big and punchy, the top end smooth and sweet, and the vocals are present and breathy.

If your copy sounds like that, you have the basic ingredients for a Hot Stamper pressing. Now all you need is half a dozen more cleaned copies and you are ready to do a shootout to find out just how good your copy may be.

On an exceptionally transparent copy the drums really punch through the dense mixes that Supertramp and Geoff Emerick favored for the album, giving the music more life and energy. (More of Geoff’s work can be found here.)

Also make sure that the piano sounds solid and clear with little to no smear, and that the sax is full and breathy. These are all critically important to getting the record to sound right, which of course is simply another way of saying getting the music to sound right.

In 2005 we wrote:

This is actually one of Supertramp’s best albums but it’s almost impossible to find a domestic copy that won’t tear your head off. The vast majority of them are unbelievably bright and grainy. I’ve been buying them lately because I found a copy or two that seemed to sound pretty good, but most of my money was wasted on aggressive, noisy vinyl.

Side one of this copy is no great shakes — it’s too bright — but side two is actually quite good. The highs are sweet and silky, there’s plenty of bass and the vocals are actually quite natural sounding. I can’t call this a Hot Stamper. The best way to look at it is to say it’s a Relatively Hot Stamper. The average copy is so bad that when a copy like this one sounds pretty good it really sticks out. We’re still in the hunt but haven’t got much to show for our efforts to date, I can tell you that.

The good news is that ten years later and more copies than we care to remember we think we’ve got EITQM’s ticket. We now know which stampers have the potential to sound good as well as the ones to avoid. Finding the right stampers (which are not the original ones for those of you who know what the original stampers for A&M records are) has been a positive boon.

Once we figured them out we were in a much better position to hear just how well recorded the album is. Now we know beyond all doubt that this recording — the first without Ken Scott producing and engineering for this iteration of the band — is of the highest quality, in league with the best. Until recently we would never have made such a bold statement. Now it’s nothing less than obvious.

Key Tracks for Critical Listening

Give a Little Bit

The piano can get buried in the dense mix. Side ones that are rich and tubey and smooth with a clear piano did very well in our shootout.

Lover Boy

A Demo Quality track on the best copies. It can be huge, spacious and lively.

Getting the strings to sound harmonically rich without sliding into shrillness is not easy but some copies manage it. The breakdown at about 2:20 is a lot of fun on the biggest, richest copies.

From Now On

On side two the recording quality of the solo piano at the start of this track is nothing short of breathtaking.

No piano on any Supertramp album sounds as good, and only the White Hot Stamper pressing will get it to sound its best.

It’s such a well-recorded piano that it will always sound at least good.

Shootouts are the only way to know when it actually sounds its best.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “…an album I know very well, and thought I already had some good pressings of it.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers’ Available Now

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

Hey Tom,   

I recently received my first LP from your company, and you will see from the attached photo that Sergeant Peppers is an album I know very well, and thought I already had some good pressings of it.

Your copy in Super Hot Stamper takes so many layers away and opens you up to the actual recording as it was intended by The Beatles, George Emerick and George Martin.

I can’t even imagine what it would sound like in White Hot, just can’t really afford them… (yet)

Kind regards,
Antoine

Antoine,

That’s great news, glad you were pleased with the sound of our Super Hot Stamper Pepper. The best pressings do indeed remove many layers and show you the sound of the real tape.

Thanks for your support and for doing your own shootout, because, as we all know, hearing is all it takes.

(more…)

Abbey Road – Select Commentaries

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

Below you will find some of the more popular commentaries we’ve written about the album.

For all you record collectors out there, please note that no pressing from 1969 has ever won a shootout. If you have a nice early UK Apple LP, we would love to sell you one that sounds better than yours, if you can spare the kind of bread we charge for the privilege of owning a masterpiece of music and sound such as this.

The Abbey Road Remix on Vinyl

The Beatles – Looking Back on Our First Abbey Road Shootout

Our Four Plus Abbey Road Shootout Winner from Way Back

https://ontherecord.co/2024/05/17/a-fun-and-easy-test-for-abbey-road-mofi-versus-apple/

Magical Mystery Touring – Our View from the Nineties

beatlmagic_depth_1176424879

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

We discuss in detail what we’re listening for and what the best copies seem to do well that the run-of-the-mill copies simply do not.

If you own a copy of the German MMT, play yours and listen for what we’re listening for. It’s all laid out in the track commentary below.

Side One

Magical Mystery Tour

The fact that this is a key track should be obvious to anyone who has ever played the album. If you don’t have a good copy of the MMT this song will take your head off. Only the German pressings have any real hope of getting it right — the MOFI, British, Japanese, domestic, etc. are uniformly awful in my experience: aggressive and irritating, the worst being the MOFI I would guess.

The German ones break down into three groups – too smooth; just right; and a bit bright or thin. Now remember, almost every copy of this record I played had the exact same stamper numbers. You can’t tell one from another except by dropping the needle on them. There is no visual clue on the record to associate with the sound, no possibility of bias. What comes out of the speakers is all I had to go by.

And it’s easy to confuse the overly smooth ones with the best ones, because on the song MMT smooth is a good thing . But when is smooth too smooth? That’s where track two comes in.

The Fool On The Hill

This song is full of airy flutes, woodwinds and the like. They should sound harmonically extended, delicate and sweet. We talked about the sound of the flutes on another record recently, Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s as a good a test for this album as it is for that one.

Having said that, what separates the killer copies from the merely excellent ones is the quality of the flute sound. When you can hear the air going through the flute, and follow the playing throughout the song, you have a superbly transparent copy with all the presence and texture of the best. If the flute sounds right Katz’s voice will too. The sound will be Demonstration Quality of the highest order. Want to shoot out two different copies of this album on side one? Easy. Just play this track and see which one gets the flute right.

On the best copies Paul’s voice is amazingly present. You should feel as though you could reach out and touch him. Which means there are two basic elements to listen for in this song, both of which must be proportional and balanced. First, the flutes must sound open and airy. Then, Paul’s voice must retain its lower-midrange body and warmth without sounding veiled or thick in any way, yet have excellent presence. Not too many copies, maybe one out of ten, can really pull it off. It’s amazing when they do though!

If the first track is alive but not aggressive, and Fool sounds the way I describe it above, the only thing left is The Walrus Test. Feel free to skip to the last track if you like.

(more…)

Sgt. Peppers on Heavy Vinyl – The Reviewers from 1982 Blow It Again

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

You might agree with some reviewers that EMI’s engineers did a pretty good job with the new Sgt. Pepper.

In the March 2013 issue of Stereophile, Art Dudley weighed in, finding little to fault on this title but being less impressed with most of the others in the new box set.

His reference disc? The MoFi UHQR. Gadzooks!

Oh, and he also has some old mono pressings and a domestic Let It Be. Now there’s a man who knows his Beatles.

Fanatical? You’re damn right he’s fanatatical. And who can blame him? We’re talkin’ The Beatles for Chrissake!

When I read the reviews by writers such as these I often get the sense that I must’ve fallen through some sort of Audio Time Warp and landed back in 1982.

How is it that our so-called experts appear to have so little understanding of how records are made, how variable the pressings can be, and, more importantly, how critical it is to maintain rigorously controlled conditions when they carry out the comparisons among pressings that they discuss in their reviews.

Here’s the gist of the problem:

Critically comparing LPs is difficult and time-consuming.  It requires highly developed listening skills. Looking back, these are skills that I know I could not possibly have had because I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about acquiring them.

I see no evidence that the audiophile reviewers of today are better at it than I was in 1982, and I was terrible.

Moving on, let’s look at what one well-known reviewer has to say, keeping in mind that he’s using his original British pressing for comparison. I quote at length — without prejudice so to speak — so there can be no misunderstanding. (Emphasis added.)

(more…)

We Get Letters about Abbey Road

Hot Stamper Pressings of Abbey Road Available Now

Below you will find some of the letters customers have sent us after playing one of our Hot Stamper pressings of Abbey Road.

Click here to see more of album overviews.

One Customer’s Ten LP Shootout for Abbey Road

Letter of the Week – “I am basically left without words, amazingly jaw dropping.”

Letter of the Week – “No one doubted your records after this listening session.”

(more…)

Are Your Cellists Digging In on I Am the Walrus?

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Beatles’ Music Available Now

This commentary was written many years ago.

Over the last decade I Am The Walrus has evolved into a good test for side one, a fact that came as a complete surprise to me. As I was listening to the various copies in a shootout years ago I noted that the opening cellos and basses in the right channel were often tonally identical from copy to copy, but sounded quite a bit more lively and energetic on some pressings relative to others. Was it EQ? Level? Compression?  

Why so much more passion from the players on some copies and not others?

As I tried to puzzle it out, playing first one copy and then another, it became clear to me what was happening. The cellists and the bassists were just plain digging HARDER into the strings on the best copies. When you see live classical music, the cellists at the front of the orchestra are usually sawing away with abandon when the music is really going. They dig their bows hard into the strings to make them vibrate as loud as possible. To make their instruments heard in the back row it becomes a matter of muscle, of pure physical exertion.

So armed with the copies where the string players are working the hardest, I checked the other tracks. Sure enough, the opening cut, MMT, jumped out of the speakers with the most energy I had heard on any copy. As I went through the tracks one by one, they had the most life of any of the copies I had been listening to. To use a word that was popular at the time, the music was HAPPENING.

This was the final piece to the puzzle. Tonality always comes first. Frequency extension; lack of distortion; rich, powerful bass — these are important qualities as well. But the life of the music is in the micro and macro dynamics, and that is what I had not been paying sufficient attention to during the shootout.

That was until I listened to Walrus and heard the players working up a good healthy sweat. Then I knew I had a Hot Stamper. And when I played the not-so-Hot Stampers, the string guys sounded like session musicians picking up a paycheck.

Where was their passion? Didn’t they realize they were making a classic?

If you get the right pressing they sure were!

(more…)

A Fun and Easy Test for Abbey Road: MoFi Versus Apple

More of the Music of The Beatles

There is a relatively simple test you can use to find out if you have a good Mobile Fidelity pressing of Abbey Road. Yes, as shocking as it may seem, they actually do exist, we’ve played them, but they are few and far between (and never as good as the best Brits).

The test involves doing a little shootout of the song Golden Slumbers between whatever MoFi pressing you have and whatever British Parlophone pressing you have. If you don’t have both LPs, this shootout will be difficult to do.

The idea is to compare aspects of the sound of both pressings head to head, which should shed light on which one of them is more natural and which is more hi-fi-ish sounding.

The Golden Slumbers Test

I’ve come to realize that this is a Key Track for side two, because what it shows you is whether the midrange of your pressing — or your system — is correct.

At the beginning Paul’s voice is naked, front and center, before the strings come in.

Most Mobile Fidelity pressings, as good as they may be in other areas, are not tonally correct in the middle of the midrange.

The middle of the voice is a little sucked out and the top of the voice is a little boosted.

It’s really hard to notice this fact unless one plays a good British pressing side by side with the MoFi.

Then the typical MoFi EQ anomaly become obvious. It may add some texture to the strings, but the song is not about the strings.

Having heard a number of audiophile systems (especially recently) that have trouble getting this part of the spectrum right, it would not be surprising that many of you do not find the typical MoFi objectionable, and may even prefer it to the good British copies. The point I’m belaboring here is that when it’s right, it’s RIGHT and everything else becomes more obviously wrong, even if only slightly wrong.

The Heart of the Midrange

For a while in my record reviewing system many years ago I had a relatively cheap Grado moving magnet cartridge. The midrange of that cartridge is still some of the best midrange reproduction I have ever heard. It was completely free of any “audiophile” sound. It was real in a way that took me by surprise. I played Abbey Road with that cartridge in the system and heard The Beatles sound EXACTLY the way I wanted them to sound.

(more…)

Watch Out for the 5c Stamper on Side One of The White Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of The White Album Available Now

Starting as early as 1984, some pressings of The White Album came with a decidely inferior side one, 5c.

Often it was mated to an equally problematic-sounding side two, -6. Although the -6 stamper can be good, when it has 5c on side one, it’s never as good as it should be.

Even though this copy had less-than-impressive sound on sides three and four — these sides qualify as minimally Hot Stamper pressings — there is nothing inherently wrong with the -2/-3 stamper numbers for those sides.

These later pressings just don’t sound as good as the earlier ones we like.

Not that we like the originals.

The few we’ve played were terrible. They tend to have -1 or -2 stampers for the first two sides, and their mastering tends to add a lot of problems to a recording that already has more than its share.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice regarding the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. The White Album sounds its best:

(more…)