Hugh Padgham, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Face Value with Hugh Padgham’s Big Drum Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Phil Collins Available Now

There may be some hope for Hello, I Must Be Going! (1982), but Phil’s third album, 1985’s No Jacket Required, sounds digital and way too heavily processed.

I suppose not many albums from 1985 weren’t, but it’s still an unfortunate development for us audiophile types who might’ve wanted to enjoy these albums but are just not able to get past the ridiculously bad sound. (If we ever do a listing for it, you can be sure it will go right into our hall of shame.)

The recording of Face Value is still analog and the quality is excellent, thanks to hugely talented engineer and producer Hugh Padgham (Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Police, Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc.)

On the best copies, the sound is nothing short of superb.

Check out Phil’s take on Tomorrow Never Knows for some heavily reverbed vocal effects, complete with a slew of backwards psychedelic sounds. If anybody can play the weirdly syncopated rhythms of TNK, it’s Phil Collins.

Whomp!

Until we heard some of the better copies, we were never able to appreciate just how important bass definition and weight are to the sound of this record. When the bass is wooly or thin, as it is on so many copies — not clear, not deep, not full enough — it throws the rest of the mix off.

When the bass is huge and powerful, the music itself becomes huge and powerful.

The copies with the big bottom end are the only ones that really make you sit up and take notice of just how big the sound is. The best Hot Stamper pressings will be Demo Discs for bass on big speakers at loud levels. Here are some others you may enjoy reading about.

After moving into our new custom-built studio and spending a few months optimizing the room treatments, we now have even more transparency in the mids and highs, while improving the whomp factor (the formula goes like this: deep bass + mid bass + speed + dynamics + energy = whomp) at the listening position.

There’s always tons of bass being produced when you have three 12′ woofers firing away, but getting the bass out of the corners and into the center of the room is one of the toughest tricks in all of audio.

Transparency Is Key

Phil’s lead and harmony vocals are both breathy and present on the best copies, with natural, not hyped-up, texture, and harmonics. This is especially important for the love songs.

The many ballads on the album — This Must Be Love and If Leaving Me Is Easy are two of our favorites — don’t work unless the sound is intimate and immediate.

Only the best pressings have the high-resolution, full-bodied sound that allows both the rockers and the ballads to sound their best.

If you’re a fan of big drums in a big room, with jump out of the speakers sound, this is the album for you.

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English Settlement – A Sonic Tour de Force

More of the Music of XTC

This is an AMAZINGLY well-recorded album, with huge amounts of open studio space and that Tubey Magical, rich, fat, dense British Rock Sound. That sound isn’t easy to reproduce, but this copy absolutely nails it. Nothing else in our shootout came close to it!

If you have big speakers and the room to play them, this is quite the sonic tour de force. Credit Hugh Padgham, producer and engineer, who’s worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Police, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Those bands make the kind of music that make good use of Padgham trademark sound: wall-to-wall, deep, layered, smooth, rich and stuffed to the gills. XTC with Padgham’s help have here produced a real steamroller of an album in English Settlement.

The big hit on this album is one that most audiophiles will probably know: Senses Working Overtime. Even over the radio you can hear how dense the production is. Imagine what it sounds like on an original British pressing with Hot Stampers, played on a modern audiophile rig. We can tell you: IT ROCKS. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “…I am surprised at how muddy the bass sounds on the new one.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sting and The Police Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a record he read about on the blog, the Nautilus pressing of Ghost in the Machine.

Hey Tom,   

Did you write something about the Nautilus record… I thought so, but I couldn’t find it.

[This Ghost in the Machine link will take you to it.]

This is one of my favorites from my teenage years and so I decided to do my own little test… Sterling vs. Nautilus vs. Half Speed Abbey Road reissue… it feels pretty clear the Sterling is tops with Nautilus close but I am surprised at how muddy the bass sounds on the new one. And just how tamped down the record sounds. Which is I guess your point.

Geoff

Geoff,

You now know a great deal more about this album than most of the audiophiles expressing their opinions on audiophile forums.

You conducted a shootout, something most of them can’t be bothered to do.

You should not be surprised about muddy bass on Half-Speed mastered records, they all have it.

And tamped down? Tell me about it.

Compressed and lifeless are two qualities the audiophile record can be guaranteed to deliver. How these companies get away with producing one shitty remaster after another is beyond me. They’ve been making this junk for more than forty years and they apparently haven’t learned anything about records in all that time.

Welcome to the upside-down world of the modern audiophile record. The worse they sound, the more audiophiles seem to like them.

Your shootout provided you with a good lesson to learn right from the start. It has set you on a better path.

Try this experiment: Take four or five UK pressings, clean them up and then compare them to any of the ones you played — the sound should be night and day better. And, after doing that shootout, one of the four or five would be a truly Hot Stamper pressing.

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Letter of the Week – “I quickly sold all those [audiophile] copies and began building a real world-class collection of Hot Stamper level records.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Hall and Oates Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

I want to thank you once again.

Quite a few years ago now I contacted you and talked about this concept called “Hot Stampers.” It ended up both saving me a lot of misdirection and foolishly trying to rebuild my vinyl collection with new vinyl re-releases often called “audiophile” and “Half-Speed” issues.

After a few confirmations of what you said, I quickly sold all those copies and began building a real world class collection of vinyl “original” Hot Stamper level records. A good number came from your business and I also made a hobby of trying to do what you do in finding “Hot Stampers.”

Fortunately Philadelphia has a reasonable number of used record stores but unfortunately, as you well know, this is a rigorous and costly endeavor, but it can be rewarding at times and at other times requires that I rely on you.

So today I’m snowed in here and I fired up the rig and decided to do some small scale shootouts and find the true great copies from my already culled collection.

Put on several Hall and Oates and focused on “She’s Gone.” One was just clearly dynamic, clear and present.

Then I put on several Dire Straits “Love Over Gold” and ended up with 3 killer copies (such a good LP).

I then put on about 5 copies of Phil Collins “Face Value” with “If Leaving Me is Hard.” What a great love song, and narrowed it to 2.

Yes my rig is really awesome for close-up intimate listening at any level. It is something I have worked on for decades to become resolving, dynamic, harmonic, dimensional transparent, and involving. I can listen loud and close without distortion. When I suddenly find that “Hot Stamper” Phil Collins is in the room where I hear his voice articulate and rich with background singers just as good and the band perfectly balanced to his vocal.

And it is then I think of your contribution to all of this and want to tell you. So that is what I am doing. I know what three stars means. I can’t afford many of them as I would assume some wealthy customers can but I really appreciate them and their unfortunate rarity and I appreciate all the work you have done to make this possible.

Ed

Ed,

We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts.

And swearing off the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing is surely one of the clearest signs of progress any audiophile can see for himself.

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Listening in Depth to Synchronicity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sting and The Police Available Now

The choruses get LOUD and are so POWERFUL on the best copies of this album that they make a mockery of most of the pressings out there.

Let’s face it, this is a big speaker record. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at fairly loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It’s the kind of recording that has caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Dynamic Speakers for as long as I can remember. You need a lot of piston area to bring the this recording to life, as well as to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so and I have never looked back.)

To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

Side One

Synchronicity I

One of the two title tracks on this record (huh?), it’s also one of the quickest ways to hear what is happening sonically on this side. It’s a high energy, take-no-prisoners rock track that usually ends up sounding bloated and brittle on the typical pressing. However, when it’s cut right it’s amazing.

The bass guitar and kick should be driving the track, not making you want to skip to the next one. Also, when you can hear the separation and detail in the multitrack army of Stings during the chorus, you’re in good shape.

Walking in Your Footsteps

Is that a pan flute I hear? More than likely it’s a synth, but if you can hear the “air” going through it and all of the ambience surrounding it, you’re not off to a bad start.

Also, the percussion should actually sound like a drum and not like a stack of textbooks getting smacked. (more…)

What to Listen For on English Settlement

Hot Stamper Pressings of Arty Rock Albums Available Now

For big production rock albums such as this there are obvious problems that are heard on at least one or two sides of practically any copy of this four-sided album you might find on your turntable.

With so many heavily-produced instruments crammed into the soundfield, if the sound is at all veiled, recessed or smeared — problems common to 90+% of the records we play in our shootouts — the mix quickly becomes opaque, forcing the listener to work too hard to separate out the various elements of musical interest.

Irritation, if not exhaustion, is bound to follow.

Some general observations about the sound of the album:

  • Transparency, clarity and presence are key.
  • None of the British copies we played was thin and anemic.
  • The domestic copies are made from dubs and can’t begin to compete.
  • Almost all the copies we played had plenty of Tubey Magic and bottom end, so thankfully that was almost never a problem.
  • They did however tend to lack top end extension and transparency, and many were overly compressed.
  • There is plenty of tube compression being used in both the mixing and mastering, but most of the time it is working its magic to keep the bass big, punchy and loud. 

Speaking of Tube Compression

Robert Ludwig used humungous amounts of tube compression on another favorite album of ours, and we’re glad he did. All that massive compression is at least partly responsible for it being one of the ten best sounding rock and pop albums ever made.

The sides that had sound that jumped out of the speakers, with driving rhythmic energy, worked the best for us. They really brought this complex music to life and allowed us to make sense of it. This is yet another definition of a Hot Stamper — it’s the copy that lets the music work as music. (more…)

Ghost in the Machine on Nautilus Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Sting and The Police Available Now

And to think we used to actually like the sound of the Nautilus pressings! They suffer from all the same shortcomings other Nautilus and similar half-speeds suffer from: the kind of pretty but lifeless and oh-so-boring sound that we describe in listing after listing. 

Three of the Best, Or So We Thought

I just did shootouts with three of the best Nautilus Half-Speeds: Heart, The Police’s Ghost in the Machine, and Little Feat. None of them sound like the real thing, and especially disappointing was one of my former favorites, the Little Feat album.

On the title track the Nautilus is amazingly transparent and sweet sounding. There are no real dynamics or bass on that track, so the “pretty” half-speed does what it does best and shines. But all the other tracks suck in exactly the same way Night and Day does. Cutting the balls off Little Feat is not my idea of hi-fidelity.

We put audiophile beaters up for sale every week. Each and every one of them is a lesson on what makes one record sound better than another. If you want a wall full of good sounding records, we can help you make it happen. In fact it will be our pleasure. Down with audiophile junk and up with Better Records.

These kinds of records used to sound good on the systems of their day, and I should know, I had an old school stereo even into the 90s.

Some of the records that sounded good to me back then don’t sound too good to me anymore.

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