Martin Birch, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Find a Copy with Drums that Punch Through the Mix on Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many pressings are compressed, murky, veiled and recessed. To find one that is transparent, clear, present and punchy is no mean feat.

Proper cleaning is essential. The early Orange label CBS pressings (the only ones that have the potential to win shootouts) too often just sound like old records until they have been properly cleaned.

There are two tracks to play to hear how well the drums punch through the mix.

Mick Fleetwood is banging the hell out of his toms on Black Magic Woman. If it doesn’t sound like he’s really pounding away, you need a better copy.

Or a better stereo; one must always be open to the possibility that the system may not be up to reproducing the punchiness of the drums.

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This Pious Bird Is a Great Intro to the Early Fleetwood Mac

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Along with their Greatest Hits compilation from 1971, Pious Bird is a great introduction to the early iteration of Fleetwood Mac. It’s an album that belongs in any right thinking audiophile’s collection.

If you’re a fan of Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac — and who in his right mind wouldn’t be — then you can’t go wrong with this record. Need Your Love So Bad, Albratross and Black Magic Woman are all featured here.

Speaking of Black Magic Woman, the best copies of Pious Bird reproduce the bass-heavy drumming on that track much better than the Greatest Hits album we also recommend. It’s very unlikely that you can find better sound for that classic than right here on this very copy.

Repeat

I have the CD of Pious Bird in my car and let me tell you, I’m more than happy to let it repeat for days at a time. I love the early BLUESY Mac on this album, a group that’s about as far from the players on Rumours as you can imagine. (Actually that’s not true; two fifths of the Mac, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, anchor both eras of the band, but the music made pre-1970 compared to that from 1975 onwards couldn’t be more different.)

The Players

  • Peter Green – vocals, guitar, harmonica (left in 1970 after Then Play On)
  • Jeremy Spencer – vocals, slide guitar (left in 1971 after Kiln House)
  • Danny Kirwan – vocals, electric guitar (left in 1972 after Bare Trees )
  • John McVie – bass guitar (still rockin’)
  • Mick Fleetwood – drums (still rockin’)

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Our 2024 Shootout Winner of Mac’s Greatest Hits Was Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

With a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, this vintage British import is doing practically everything right.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “big and tubey and weighty”…”lots of space and detail”…”sweet and breathy vox”…”jumping out of the speakers.”

Big, rich, energetic, with an abundance of analog Tubey Magic, this original Orange Label UK pressing has exactly the right sound for this music.

“Oh Well, Parts One and Two,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Man of the World,” and the surprise Number One single “Albatross” are all here and guaranteed to blow your mind.

Peter Green is hands down our favorite British Blues Guitarist of All Time – play this record and you will surely see why we feel that way.

This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, this copy is guaranteed to blow your mind. Like all the best vintage British pressings, the sound is smooth, rich and full.

This is Old School ANALOG, baby. They don’t make ’em like this anymore because they don’t know how to.

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Add Made in Japan to the List of Ridiculously Bad DCC Titles

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Deep Purple Available Now

What a murky mess. The sound is dead as a doornail.

It’s yet another audiophile record hall of shame pressing, a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

That’s hard to say. But it is the worst sounding version of the album we’ve ever played, and that should be good enough for any audiophile contemplating spending money on this kind of trash. Take our advice and don’t do it.

If you like the sound of old McIntosh tube equipment such as the Mac 30s shown here, a sound Steve Hoffman apparently cannot get enough of, DCC is the label for you.

We don’t sell junk like this, but every other audiophile record dealer does, because most of the current group of mastering engineers making records for audiophiles have somehow gotten into their heads that this is the way records should sound.

We’ve been telling them they are wrong about that for years now, that good records have never sounded this way, but the collectors and audiophiles of the world keep buying their wares, so why should they listen to us?

What a Fool Believes

I used to like some of the DCC vinyl titles just fine too. Didn’t play them very often, but I liked what I heard when I did.

Then my stereo got a lot better. Eventually it became obvious to me what was wrong with practically all of the Heavy Vinyl pressings put out by that label. (That story from 1998 gets told in some detail here.)

Heavy Vinyl

The good Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group, along with other Heavy Vinyl pressings we liked or used to like.

The bad Heavy Vinyls can be found in this group. And those in the middle end up in this group.

Audio and record collecting (they go hand in hand) are hard. If you think either one is easy you are very likely not doing it right, but what makes our twin hobbies compelling enough to keep us involved over the course of a lifetime is one simple fact, which is this: Although we know so little at the start, and we have so much to learn, the journey itself into the world of music and sound turns out to be both addictive and a great deal of fun.

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Letter of the Week – “Hard to believe it can sound much better.”

More of the Music of Deep Purple

More of the Music of Jackson Browne

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently. He bought two Jackson Browne albums — The Pretender and Late for the Sky, not sure which he is talking about below — as well as the Deep Purple album you see pictured. (Emphasis added.)

Hey Tom, 

I am taking my time going through all my hot stampers one by one. Still waiting for my cartridge to break in so I know things will only get better.

This album is amazing. I forgot how good it was. Only had the cassette back in the day and loved playing it in the car. The overall tonal balance is fantastic. Big, room filling sound. Jackson’s voice is just so well centered in the mix.

I think your rating may have been a bit conservative. Hard to believe it can sound much better.

Side 2 is probably my favorite and sounds even better than side 1 to my ears–but it is close. Another winner for sure.

Thanks!

Rob

Rob,

So glad you liked it!

As for the grades, we don’t keep them around, but we liked two copies better than that one, which just goes to show you never know how good a record can sound until you hear a better sounding copy, and we heard two.

This is something the forum posters of the audio world have always had trouble understanding.

They think they have a Hot Stamper when what they probably have is a good sounding record.

The word “probably” in the sentences above and below is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Nothing in audio or record collecting could be more important than appreciating how little we can really know and how much there is to learn. [3]

The forum posters of the audio world simply have no way to know how amazing the recording can sound — so much better than the record they own, probably — so they assume [1] they have the best.

They probably do not, but no one can actually know for sure, and that includes us.

We do not judge records we have never played (although we do like to make educated guesses about some of them from time to time, for sport if for no other reason).

A shootout would provide some of the evidence they need in order to know where on the bell curve their copy sits, and they have simply never conducted one. They have an anecdote, and not a very trustworthy one. What they lack is data [2].

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Beware The Green Manalishi with the Two Prong Crown

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

Many years ago, more than 20 in fact!, a copy of this record was returned by one of my customers for poor sound quality, so I threw it back on the turntable to see if I had been mistaken in my judgement of its sound.

I confess that hearing the first track again, The Green Manalishi, was painful — it’s the worst sounding song on the album.

But then Oh Well starts up, and it’s full of midrange magic, ambience and exceptional transparency.

The sound varies from track to track after that, but if your stereo can’t find the magic on records like this, you seriously need to look into some better equipment.

This record sounds amazing on our system and it ought to at your house too.

The real test for a stereo is to get difficult to reproduce recordings to sound good, not easy to reproduce recordings.

If you want to test your system after doing some tweaking and tuning, these are the kinds of difficult to reproduce records that will allow you to do it.

When these records start sounding better, there’s a good chance that whatever you did to your system to improve it actually worked.

And if you’re up for a challenge and want to buy some records that can sound great but are difficult to reproduce, these Hot Stamper pressings should do the trick.

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Machine Head on Rhino Vinyl Sounds Like a CD

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Deep Purple Available Now

Mastered by Kevin Gray, this record has what we would call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the British originals are swimming in.

In other words, it sounds like a CD.

I’m guessing that very few people have ever heard this record sound the way our best Hot Stamper pressings can sound.

For one thing, the domestic pressings are made from dubbed tapes, and that’s what most of us Americans would have owned. The original domestic pressings are smeary, veiled and small as a rule

Yes, the average copy may be nothing special, but this one is a boring, lifeless mess, so save your money.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using “performance” as a synonym “sound quality,” we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

Who can be bothered to play a record that has so few of the qualities audiophiles should be looking for on vinyl?

Back in 2007 we put the question this way: why own a turntable if you’re going to play mediocrities like these?

Further Reading

Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.

If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, making the same kind of mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.

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Listening in Depth to Bare Trees

More of the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Fleetwood Mac

Presenting another entry in our extensive Listening in Depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Bare Trees.

Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

Side One

Child of Mine

A real rocker from Danny Kirwan. If the electric piano is rich on your copy and you have some top end and space you are probably off to a very good start.

The Ghost
Homeward Bound
Sunny Side of Heaven

A wonderfully poignant, even melancholy instrumental track by Bob Welch. Not sure if that’s him on guitar but the playing is beautiful. The high point of side one.

Side Two

This is where most of the best music on Bare Trees can be found. We like every song on this side.

Bare Trees

If this song doesn’t get your blood pumping, you need to turn up the volume another click or two. There is tremendous energy and joy in this song, and it needs to be played loud to get those feelings across.

Sentimental Lady
Danny’s Chant
Spare Me a Little of Your Love

This is a tough track to get right. The Brit is smoother and sweeter, which works on this song. Bad copies can sound hard on Christine’s vocals as well as the chorus.

Dust

One of my all time favorite Fleetwood Mac songs. On a good copy this track sounds so sweet. The texture to the voices is right on the money — neither grainy nor dull.

Thoughts on a Grey Day (more…)

Martin Birch Knows How to Get the Big Rock Sound of Deep Purple on Tape

More Recordings Engineered by Martin Birch

More of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Deep Purple Albums

When you get a Hot Stamper pressing like this one, Machine Head is a True Rock and Roll Demo Disc. Since our stereo is all about playing these kinds of records, and playing them at good loud levels as nature — and the artists — intended, we had a helluva time with Machine Head.

It had the kind of presence and energy that puts most copies of this album to shame. It’s also amazingly spacious, the result no doubt of it being recorded practically live in the studio.

On the best copies you can really hear the sound bouncing off the studio walls, just as you can on the best Zep, AC/DC and Bad Co. albums. You can just tell they are all playing this one live: it’s so relaxed and natural and REAL sounding. (More recordings with that sound can be found here.)

The vocalist is no doubt in a booth, but everyone else seems to be in a lively studio. With lovely extension up top this was a very sweet copy that cried out to be turned up good and loud. The louder we played it the better it sounded.

If you’ve got the full range dynamic speakers to play Deep Purple good and loud, you will discover, as we have, what a powerful British Blues Rock band they were.

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Made in Japan – One of the All Time Great Sounding Live Rock Albums

deeppmadei_1606_1152215422More of the Music of Deep Purple

Machine Head Live? That would not be far off, and the fact they brought Martin Birch along with them all the way to Japan in order to engineer a live album that was only supposed to sell to the Japanese market (!) could not have been more fortuitous for us audiophiles.

Machine Head is clearly one of the best sounding hard rock records ever made, and Made In Japan, its successor, sounds more like a top quality studio production than any live album I’ve ever heard. It’s shocking how clean and undistorted the sound is. Equally shocking is the fact that it’s every bit as big and lively as a Hard Rockin’ Live Album should be.

This is a combination the likes of which we hear far too rarely.

We’ve raved about a number of live albums over the years. Some of the better sounding ones that come readily to mind (in alphabetical order) are listed below. Fans of any of these bands can be proud to have a Hot Stamper pressing of any of these albums in their collection.

The albums I would want in my personal collection are noted with an asterisk [*].

  • The Band / Rock of Ages*
  • Harry Belafonte / At Carnegie Hall*
  • David Bowie / David Live*
  • Johnny Cash / At San Quentin
  • Cheap Trick / At Budokan
  • Eric Clapton / Just One Night*
  • Deep Purple / Made in Japan
  • Donny Hathaway / Live*
  • Jimi Hendrix / The Jimi Hendrix Concerts
  • Humble Pie / Performance – Rockin’ The Fillmore
  • Albert King / Live Wire – Blues Power
  • Little Feat / Waiting For Columbus*
  • Lou Rawls / Live!*
  • The Rolling Stones / Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out* 
  • The Who / Live at Leeds*

Having just played a stack of copies of Made In Japan, I’d put it right up there with the best of the best.

In terms of Tubey Magic, richness and naturalness — qualities that are usually in very short supply on live albums — I would have to say that the shootout winning copies of Made In Japan might just take Top Honors for Best Sounding Live Rock Album of All Time. Yes, the sound is that good.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our Moderately Helpful Advice about the pressings that have tended to win shootouts over the years.

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