Roy Halee, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

On Super Session, Tonally Correct Vocals Are Key

More Music Produced or Performed by Al Kooper

Most copies have bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, this album pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud. At higher volumes the distortion and grit are just too much.

On the better copies, the one with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange, you are doing better than expected.

We’re Big Fans

Super Session is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:

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What’s the Average Record Worth?

More Letters from Customers and Critics Alike

What follows is an excerpt from a very old letter (circa 2005) in which the writer attempted to make the case that spending lots of money on records is foolish when a dollar buys a perfectly good record at a thrift store and provides the listener with exactly the same music and decent enough sound.

We think this is silly and, with a few rough calculations, along with a heavy dose of self-promotion and not a little bullying, we set out to prove that the average record is practically worthless. Prepare to confront our exercise in sophistry.

(Yes, we are well aware that our reasoning is specious, but it’s no more specious than anybody else’s reasoning about records if I may say so.)

Jason, our letter writer, points out this fact:

Your records are a poor value in terms of investment. Until you convince the whole LP community that your HOT-STAMPER choices are the pinnacle of sound a buyer will never be able to re-sell B S & T for $300. Even if they swear it is the best sounding copy in the world.

We replied as follows:

If records are about money, then buying them at a thrift store for a buck apiece and getting something halfway decent makes perfect sense. As the Brits say, “that’s value for money.” If we sell you a Hot Stamper for, say, $500, can it really be five hundred times better?

The Math

I would argue that here the math is actually on our side. The average pressing is so close to worthless sonically that I would say that it isn’t even worth the one dollar Jason might pay for it in a thrift store. I might value it somewhere in the vicinity of a penny or two. Really? Yes indeed.

Assuming it’s a record I know well, I probably know just how wonderful the record can really sound, and what that wonderful sound does to communicate the most important thing of all: the musical value.

A copy that doesn’t do that — allow the music to come alive — has almost no value. It’s not zero, but it’s close to zero. Let’s assign it a nominal value. We’ll call it a penny.

What Have You Got to Lose?

You see, when I play a mediocre copy, I know what I’ve lost.

Jason can’t know that. All he knows is what he hears coming from his mediocre equipment as his mediocre LP is playing. To him it sounds fine. To me it sounds like hell. (Hell is in fact the place where they make you listen to bad sounding records all day.)

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Super Session – A Jack Hunt Mastered MoFi Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of Music Produced or Performed by Al Kooper Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

Super Session is one of the best-sounding MoFi pressings. The midrange sounds wonderful — silky sweet and transparent. Not having been cut by Stan Ricker, the top end doesn’t have that SR/2 boost. Overall it’s a very nice sounding record, and the music just can’t be beat. 

In fact, it was actually mastered by Jack Hunt, a man we know to be responsible for some of the thickest, dullest, deadest MoFi recuts found in their shameful catalog.

But he did a pretty good job on this one, and for that he deserves some credit.

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Listening in Depth to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.

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

Side One

Scarborough Fair/Canticle

Listen carefully to the voices on this track, one of our favorites to test with. On the best copies they sound exceptionally delicate yet full-bodied.

Patterns

The percussion on this track is a great test for smear, a problem that plagues most pressings to one degree or another. On the better copies you’ll distinctly hear the sound of the drummer’s hands hitting the skins of the bongos, as well as lots of ambience and echo around the drums.

Note also that every stereo copy we’ve ever played spits at least a little on this song.

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For the Best Sound, Stick to the 360s on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More superb sound from the legendary CBS 30th street studios in New York!

This album checks off some big boxes for us here at Better Records.

Turn up the volume, turn down the lights, and you’ll have one of the best — if not THE best — folk duos of all time performing right there in your listening room for you. The sound is open, spacious, and transparent with breathy vocals and unusually low levels of spit. The strings are more dynamic than we’re used to hearing and the bottom end has really nice weight to it.

These old Simon & Garfunkel records weren’t often owned by audiophiles who kept their records in pristine condition. 

No, these were the popular records of their day, purchased by the record-buying public, and they were played and played hard, typically on cheap equipment. There are many quiet passages on this album that are going to reveal whatever surface issues might exist, so a copy that plays Mint Minus Minus is about as good as you can hope for.

Since only the right vintage 360 pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell.

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Letter of the Week – “whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

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

Hey Tom, 

That latest S&G album — BOTW — is absofuckinglutely blowing my mind tonight. Wow. Those deep horns (?) blasting at times (end of Keep the Customer Satisfied, chorus of Why Don’t You Write Me, end of The Boxer… whole thing is hopping and dancing with huge beautiful sound. Hard to sit down!!

Dear C.

The power of those horns is exactly what I was telling you about –  they cannot be reproduced properly until you have speakers with dynamic drivers large enough to play the full weight of the brass.

TP

We discuss the idea of Big Speakers in this boilerplate commentary all over the site:

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 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 this recording to life, and 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.

Further Reading

Listening in Depth to Bookends

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

Musically side two is one of the strongest in the entire Simon and Garfunkel oeuvre (if you’ll pardon my French). Each of the five songs could hold its own as a potential hit on the radio, and there is no filler to be found anywhere. How many albums from 1968 can make that claim?

The estimable Roy Halee handled the engineering duties. Not the most ‘natural” sounding record he ever made — the processing is heavy handed on a number of tracks — but that’s clearly not what neither he nor the duo were going for.

If you want natural, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme has what you are looking for. That said, as of 2022 both are Top 100 Titles.

The three of them would obviously take their sound much farther in that direction with the Grammy winning Bridge Over Troubled Water from 1970.

The bigger production songs on this album have a tendency to get congested on even the best pressings, which is not uncommon for four track recordings from the 60s. Those of you with properly set up high-dollar front ends should have less of a problem than some. $3000 cartridges can usually deal with this kind of complex information better than $300 ones.

But not always. Expensive does not always mean better, since painstaking and exacting setup is so essential to proper playback.

The Wrecking Crew provided top quality backup, with Hal Blaine on drums and percussion, Joe Osborn on bass and Larry Knechtel on piano and keyboards.

Side One

Bookends Theme
Save the Life of My Child

I used to think this track would never sound good enough to use as an evaluation track. It’s a huge production that I’d found practically impossible to get to sound right on even the best original copies of the album. Even as recently as ten years ago I had basically given up trying.

Thankfully things have changed. Nowadays, with great copies at our disposal and a system that is really cooking, virtually all of the harmonic distortion in the big chorus near the opening disappears. It takes a very special pressing and a very special stereo to play this song.

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Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound

More Outlier Pressings We’ve Discovered

This commentary was written about ten twenty years ago and has been updated more than a few times since.

A while back we did a monster-sized shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second release, an album we consider THE Best Sounding Rock Record of All Time.

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds — a copy we gave a Hot Stamper grade of A with Four Pluses, the highest honor we can bestow upon it — various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne, How did it get here?

  • We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
  • Nowadays we usually place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these familiar recordings.
  • When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
  • Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”

Which brings us to this commentary, which centers around the concept of outliers.

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Listening in Depth to Still Crazy After All These Years

More of the Music of Paul Simon

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Still Crazy. Here are some albums currently on our site with similar Track by Track breakdowns.

As exceptionally well-produced, well-engineered Pop Albums from the ’70s, the very best copies can proudly hold their heads high. Wait a minute. Our last commentary noted what a mess most of the pressings of this album sound like, with so much spit and grain. Have we changed our minds? Well, yes and no, and as usual we make no excuses for having changed our minds. We call it progress.

Yes, most copies are still a mess, but No, some copies now sound far better than we ever thought possible.

As we noted in our previous commentary for the Hot Stamper Still Crazy (back in 2005!), when we first dropped the needle on side one of another copy of this record, we were shocked to hear how spitty, grainy and transistory sounding the album was. We could hardly believe that a mainstream pop album by Paul Simon could sound this bad. It was pure spitty DISTORTION with ZERO midrange magic. A CD would sound better. Even Graceland, a famously compressed, phony, digital sounding album wouldn’t sound this bad!

A bad copy you say? Maybe they don’t all sound bad on side one, but there sure are a lot of them that do. Two tracks in particular — in fact, the two biggest tracks on side one — have fairly bad sound on almost any copy you play: Still Crazy and 50 Ways…

The True Tests for Side One

What separates the mediocre-to-bad-sounding average copy from a Hot Stamper is how well mastered those two songs are. In other words, if you get those two tracks right — breathy vocals, sounding smooth and sweet, with the sibilance under control, supported by good solid bass — the whole side is going to be good, maybe even as good as it gets.

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Letter of the Week – “…makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.”

More of the Music of Simon and Garfunkel

More of the Music of Pink Floyd

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

Hey Tom, 

I absolutely love my Hot Stamper of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and of Dark Side of the Moon, and so many others that you have sold to me.

I find myself just playing the same side over and over, never tiring of the music. Which is something I never do with a CD….. no matter with a Reimyo CD player, or CEC TL-1X with Audiologic DAC, or even Acoustic Arts DAC, which actually sounds pretty good, but still fatiguing, and missing the immediacy and soul of a good LP — and in addition to sounding better, there is just something about having an original copy made back when the music was fresh and newly released, putting me back in my college years, and somehow linking up the past to the present.

The music is living there in those grooves, even better now because I can actually hear the music with a decent system. I don’t think many record players back in 1972- 1978 could begin to do these records justice.

Thanks so much for all the great music – makes my years of developing and investing in my stereo worthwhile.

Kurt B.

Kurt, you are welcome!

We love both these albums and we’re in agreement with you that the music is more alive in these grooves than it could ever be in the digits of a CD.

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