Glyn Johns, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Letter of the Week – “No record I own ever did that.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

This week’s letter came from Dan, a long time customer of ours. When he ordered this album he left the following note in his order comments:

This is one of my favorite albums of all time!! One of my personal desert island discs. Can’t wait to hear it!.

I’m not sure his ears were prepared for what was about to happen though. Read on to see what Dan thought of his Very Hot Who’s Next.

Hey Tom,

Just listened to the Very Hot Stamper of “Who’s Next” and thought I’d drop a little note: Holy F**K that was POWERFUL!

No record I own ever did that!

And I’m talking bone-rattling, earth-shaking, sock-you-in-the-gut POWERFUL. I’ve always known that The Who were one of the most intense bands in the history of rock n’ roll. Hell, everybody knows that and it’s part of the reason we love ’em so much. But with this record, I experienced the sheer physical force of their music like I NEVER have before. I couldn’t believe I heard bass notes hang in the air and resonate for long stretches. Bass notes never just hang like that! No record I own ever did that. (more…)

More Bass or More Detail, Which Is Right?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

With Doug Sax mastering from the real tape, you get a Rock Solid Bottom End like you will not believe. Talk about punchy, well-defined and deep, man, this record has BASS that you sure don’t hear too often on rock records. 

And it’s not just bass that separates the Men from the Boys, or the Real Thing from the Classic Reissue for that matter. It’s WEIGHT, fullness, the part of the frequency range from the lower midrange to the upper bass, that area that spans roughly 150 to 600 cycles.

It’s what makes Daltry’s voice sound full and rich, not thin and modern.

It’s what makes the drums solid and fat the way Johns intended.

The good copies of Who’s Next and Quadrophenia have plenty of muscle in this area, and so do the imports we played.

But not the Classic. Oh no, so much of what gives Who By Numbers its Classic Rock sound has been equalized right out of the Heavy Vinyl reissue by Chris Bellman at BG’s mastering house.

Some have said the originals are warmer but not as detailed. I would have to agree, but that misses the point entirely: take out the warmth — the fullness that makes the original pressings sound so right — and you of course hear more detail, as the detail region is no longer masked by all the stuff going on below it.

Want to hear detail? Disconnect your woofers — you’ll hear plenty of detail all right!

Keep that in mind when they tell you at the store that the record you brought in to audition is at fault, not their expensive and therefore “correct” equipment. I’ve been in enough of these places to know better. To mangle another old saying, if you know your records, their excuses should fall on deaf ears. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “The vocal, dynamic range, space, punch, energy, detail … it was just a night and day difference.”

What’s It Like to Play a White Hot Stamper Pressing?

We’re happy to let our good customer Bill tell us all about his recent listening session with a couple of his fellow analog audio enthusiasts.

When it comes to the five amazingly well-recorded titles you see pictured, it’s clearly a very special experience, one he was lucky to be able to share with his friends, and what could be better than that?

Fred,

Several weeks ago, I hosted a Hot Stamper/heavy vinyl comparison for a couple of my friends. Both of my friends have spent most of their lives in the high-end music industry.

We started with Deja Vu. One of my friends had brought the 50th Anniversary deluxe edition, and warned me that it was amazing, and would be impossible to top. One of his clients had recommended it to him and raved about it. We played the first track of that edition, Carry On, and then played the same track on the Hot Stamper.

A few seconds into the Hot Stamper, when the harmonies kicked in, my friend’s mouth dropped. He managed to whisper “Glorious.” It was a revelation. And then we enjoyed several other songs on the album. It’s just great music, wonderfully recorded. As a result of this comparison, a few days later my friend bought a Super Hot Stamper of Deja Vu from you.

Next up was The Eagles debut album. This was not a straight-up comparison of albums, because I only had one copy of the album, and that was the Super Hot Stamper. But one of my friends had brought the DCC Greatest Hits album, which is widely recognized as being the best version of that album. [Not by us!]

We compared Witchy Woman on the two albums. And the contrast was even greater than the Carry On comparison. Everything was better on the Hot Stamper. The vocal, dynamic range, space, punch, energy, detail…it was just a night and day difference. Witchy Woman has become my favorite demo song.

The last of the comparisons was a White Hot Stamper RL Led Zeppelin 2 with the Classic Records version. We decided to focus on Bring it On Home and Moby Dick. You just couldn’t listen to the Classic at the same volume as the RL. It was painfully bright at loud volume. The RL was a joy to listen to.

And that harmonica on Bring it On Home—wow. It was in the room. And the drums on Moby Dick were as close to “live” as you could probably get. Gut-punchingly wonderful. So of course we listened to several more tracks just for enjoyment.

Wanting to hear more “blow your mind” rock, we listened to a White Hot Stamper of Who’s Next. We didn’t compare it to anything, we just listened. And were transported.

Finally, one of my friends said we had to call it a night, because he was jet lagged, felt a cold coming on, and was exhausted. As he got up to leave, he stopped and said “But wait. You said you just got a WH Stamper of Tapestry. Can I listen to that for a second? I’m wondering how it compares to the MoFi.”

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The Wrong Early Pressings of Mad Dogs and Englishmen Have Horrendous Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

If you get the wrong stampers on this record, you will discover, as we did, that it’s clearly been mastered from a badly made dub. The “cassette-like” sound quality will not be hard to recognize. If you have stumbled onto one of those pressings, give up on it and try your luck elsewhere, making sure to note the bad stampers.

Most copies have a tendency to get smeary and congested when loud.

Listen for good transients and not too much compression.

Most copies are opaque, as well as dull up top; try to find the ones with some degree of transparency and as much top end extension as you can (the percussion will be helped most of all by the extended top).

And of course you need to find a copy that rocks, as this is a definitely a Rock Concert, although what it most reminds me of is Ray Charles doing a choice set of modern classics, mixing it up by off-handedly mixing in a few of his own. See how they all fit together? That’s how the pros do it. (The main pro in this case is Leon Russell, the mastermind of the whole operation. He clearly knows what he is doing.)

All tracks were selected and mixed by none other than the legendary Glyn Johns.

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Listening In Depth to Let It Be

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This is the first time we’ve discussed individual tracks on Let It Be.

Our recent shootout [now many years ago], in which we discovered a mind-boggling, rule-breaking side one, motivated us to sit down and explain what the best copies should do on each side of the album for the tracks we test with. Better late than never I suppose. 

These also happen to be the ones that we can stand to hear over and over, dozens of times in fact, which becomes an important consideration when doing shootouts, as we must do them for hours on end.

On the better pressings the natural rock n’ roll energy of a song such as Dig A Pony will blow your mind. There’s no studio wizardry, no heavy-handed mastering, no phony EQ — just the sound of the greatest pop/rock band of all time playing and singing their hearts out.

It’s the kind of thrill you really don’t get from the more psychedelic albums like Sgt. Pepper’s or Magical Mystery Tour. You have to go all the way back to Long Tall Sally and Roll Over Beethoven to find the Beatles consistently letting loose the way they do on Let It Be (or at least on the tracks that are more or less live, which make up about half the album).

Side One

Two of Us

Dig a Pony

On the heavy guitar intro for Dig a Pony, the sound should be full-bodied and Tubey Magical, with plenty of bass. If your copy is too lean, just forget it, it will never rock.

What blew our minds about the Shootout Winning side one we played recently was how outrageously big, open and transparent it was. As the song started up the studio space seemed to expand in every direction, creating more height, width and depth than we had ever experienced with this song before.

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How Do the The Mastering Lab Pressings of Sticky Fingers Sound?

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

A listing for an early domestic Hot Stamper pressing for Sticky Fingers will typically be introduced like this:

If you have never heard one of our Hot Stamper pressings of the album, you (probably) cannot begin to appreciate just how amazing the sound is.

A landmark Glyn Johns / Andy Johns recording, our favorite by the Stones, a Top 100 Title (of course) and 5 stars on Allmusic (ditto).

After hearing so much buzz about it, we finally broke down and ordered a German TML pressing about a year ago. Having played scores of phenomenally good sounding copies of the album over the past fifteen or so years, we were very skeptical that anyone could cut the record better than the mastering engineers who inscribed Rolling Stones Records into the dead wax on the early pressings. (I could find no mastering engineers credited.)

Well, the results were not good. As we suspected would be the case, we were not impressed in the least with what The Mastering Lab — one of the greatest independent cutting houses of all time, mind you — had wrought.

Their version is not really even good enough to charge money for. It might have earned a grade of One Plus, just under the threshold for a Hot Stamper that we would put on the site these days. Decent, but not much more than that.

Wait, There’s More

We subsequently learned that it is the British TML pressings that are supposed to be the best.

So we got one of those in, an A3/B4 copy.

Better, but good enough? Barely.

Here are the notes for the copy we played. For those who have trouble reading our writing, I have transcribed the notes as follows:

Side One

Track one:

Weighty, a bit veiled or smeary. Backing vox kinda lost.

Track three:

Very full, rockin’ but not the sparkle/space.

Kinda compressed.

Not as huge.

Side Two

Track two:

Not as rich, clear.

A bit pushy/dry vox.

No real space.

Thick drums

Track one:

This works better.

A bit hard, but full and lively.

This Sound?

Is this the sound audiophiles are raving about?

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Your Shootout Questions Answered – Part One

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

Robert Brook wrote to me recently with some questions.

Hi Tom,

I read your recent post about Sticky Fingers and the European TML reissues you included in shootouts.

It raised a question for me that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while now.

The fact that the UK TML earned an A+ to A++ grade and that, with just a one copy sample, you wouldn’t consider that pressing to have shootout winning potential, suggests to me that the US pressings you favor will grade at A++ or higher.

In other words, if you put a shootout together of [redacted stamper] pressings and whatever else you like, does every copy in the shootout grade at least A++ / A++? Are the right stampers that reliable?

I guess I’ve always assumed that even if you put together a shootout with this or any other title, and even if you only include pressings that have won or placed high in the past, at least a couple of them would end up graded no higher than A+ or A+ to A++.

And if that is correct, wouldn’t it be worth buying more UK TML’s to see if any emerge that could win a shootout?

With Revolver, for instance, why not just do shootouts with [redacted numbers] if those are the ones that win the shootouts? Why even bother with [later pressings]?

Robert,

All good questions! I could go on for days with this kind of inside baseball stuff. I’ve been living it full time for more than twenty years, and it obviously interests you because you are actually trying to hone your shootout skills and figure out how many of what pressings you need to get one going, etc., etc.

Not many others are doing what you are doing in a serious way, so how helpful anyone will find this information is hard to know. Under the circumstances, I should have kept my answers shorter rather than longer but I could not resist going into more detail than might have been advisable. Feel free to skim if you like.

Why not put more TML pressings into shootouts?

If they had pressed plenty of them and they’d ended up sitting in record bins all over town for twenty bucks a pop, we could get a bunch in and see if we could figure which stampers, if any, are able to reach the Super Hot stamper level.

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What Track Here Would Be Right at Home on David Crosby’s First Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

Our last shootout for this album took place in 2021. I wish we could keep the record in stock but finding the right stampers these days is not easy.

Still, as a favorite album of mine, I listen to the album regularly, just not on vinyl. Both the standard CD and the cassette I have sound right to me, sounding very much like the original record.

Recently I was playing the album and heard a song that sounded an awful lot like it might have been produced by the same team that recorded David Crosby’s first album, If Only I Could Remember My Name.

If you’re up for it, listen to the Crosby, then play the Nash and see if you can spot it. Feel free to leave your impressions in the comments section below.

Digging Deeper

Songs for Beginners is one of those albums that made me want to dig deeper into audio. After every improvement I managed to make to the system, Songs for Beginners would be one of the records that I would play (at very high volume) to see what changes I had brought about.

All the best changes — the ones I kept — always made the album sound better than I had last heard it. Over the course of decades the sound became amazingly good, a true Demo Disc that belonged in the company of Tea for the Tillerman or Dark Side of the Moon.

Back in the 70s and the 80s, not so much later as I had found plenty of other tough test discs by then, it helped me dramatically improve the playback quality of my system, which, to be honest, had a very long way to go, although I sure didn’t know that at the time. I thought it sounded great.

Early on in the history of our track by track breakdowns, written in order to aid listeners in testing their stereos and the other copies of the record they might own, we did a breakdown for the album which you can read here.

If you can’t find a nice original, whatever you do, don’t buy the awful Classic Records pressing of the album. They ruined it.

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The Who By Numbers – How Did We Know Side Two Was Slightly Veiled?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Here is how we might typically describe one of our Shootout Winning copies:

Who By Numbers returns to the site for only the second time in over three years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage Polydor import pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too.

Glyn Johns‘s magic is on display here, with open mics in a big studio space creating the 3D soundscapes we love.

Features two of their most iconic songs, “Slip Kid” and “Squeezebox,” and both sound incredible on this copy.

To back it all up, here are the notes for that very copy.

We started playing track three on side one, Squeeze Box, and returned to that track when we had two top copies to play against each other in the final round. Which one won? The one with “the most body and tubes.”

Note that side two of this copy was slightly veiled compared to the side two of the best copy we played, the one that would go on to earn 3+.

We don’t like veiled records — records where there is a curtain, no matter how transparent, in front of the musicians. Heavy Vinyl pressings are typically quite veiled and recessed in the midrange compared to their vintage vinyl counterparts, and that sound is simply not going to cut it with us. (Other folks may prefer a different sound it seems.)

Midrange presence is one of the most important qualities of any rock or pop recording we evaluate. You want Roger Daltry to be front and center, neither recessed nor behind a veil.

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Most Domestic Pressings of On The Border Suck, and We Know Why

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with reversed polarity on some songs.

The domestic copies of On The Border have many tracks in reversed absolute phase, including and especially Midnight Flyer, a lifelong favorite of mine. The front and center banjo will positively tear your head off; it’s bright, sour, shrill, aggressive and full of distortion. Don’t look at me — that’s what reverse polarity sounds like!

I’ve known for some time that domestic pressings of On The Border have their phase reversed — just hadn’t gotten around to discussing the issue because I wasn’t ready to list the record and describe the phenomenon.

A while back [January 2005, time flies] I happened to play a copy of One Of These Nights and was appalled by the dismal quality of the sound. Last night I put two and two together. I pulled out both Eagles records and listened to them with the phase reversed. Voila! (On The Border is a favorite record of mine, dismissed by everyone else, but loved by yours truly.)

[I don’t think One of These Nights has its polarity reversed anymore, although some copies may.]

I’m of the opinion that only a very small percentage of records have their absolute phase reversed. Once you’ve learned to recognize the kind of distortion reversed polarity causes, you will hear recordings that may make you suspicious, and the only way to know for sure is to switch the positive and negative, wherever you choose to do so. 

With the help of our EAR 324 Phono Stage, the phase is reversible with the mere touch of a button, a wonderful convenience that we have grown to love, along with the amazingly transparent sound of course. (Hard to imagine living without either at this point.)

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