Top Engineers – Brian Humphries

Black Sabbath – Import or Domestic?

More of the Music of Black Sabbath

More Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Recordings

The domestic copies we’ve played over the years for all the Black Sabbath titles are clearly better sounding than any import we’ve ever auditioned. It may be counterintuitive but these are exactly the kinds of things you find out when doing blinded shootouts.

We have little use for intuitions (UK recording, UK pressing) and rules of thumb (original = better sound). We call that way of approaching the search for better sounding pressings mistaken audiophile thinking. 

Hard data — the kind you get from actually playing the records — trumps them all.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice for how to find your own shootout winners.

As of 2024, shootouts for this album should be carried out:

How else can you hear them right?

Based on what were the winners of our most recent shootout, Paranoid should sound its best:

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Traffic – Another Disgraceful MoFi Anadisq Release

More of the Music of Traffic

More of the Music of Steve Winwood

Sonic Grade: F

Another MoFi LP debunked.

Of course our Hot Stamper pressings are going to be better than the Anadisq LP from the mid ’90s.

How much better?

Words fail me.

The MoFi of Low Spark of High Heeled Boys was an out and out disaster. Perhaps some of the MoFi collectors didn’t notice because they had nothing to compare it to. God forbid they would ever lower themselves to buy a “common” pressing such as one of our domestic Islands.

Had they done so what they would have heard is huge amounts of musical information that is simply missing from the MoFi pressing.

The MoFi has no leading edges to any of the transients; they’re shaved off, how they achieved this I cannot begin to fathom. Bad cutting equipment using a dull needle?

Blunted and smeared, their version is positively unlistenable. Robert Pincus once left a Post-It note stuck to a MoFi jacket of a record he was playgrading for me that pointedly summed up our shared thoughts on the quality of their mastering: “Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”

Spooky Tooth / Witness – Our Shootout Winner from 2009

This very nice looking Island Sunray British Import LP has GREAT SOUND on side one — we rate it A++ or thereabouts. (There may be a copy out there that’s worthy of our Triple Plus grade and there may not; this is the first clean early British copy we’ve played and it sounded so good to us we didn’t think there was much room for improvement, on side one anyway. Hence the grade.)

Although it’s not Glyn Johns that engineered this album, it was recorded at Island and Olympic studios, both of which are top quality locations famous for producing some of the best sounding rock records in the history of the world. (more…)

Spooky Tooth – The Last Puff

  • An outstanding Island Pink Label pressing of the band’s 1970 release, with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from first note to last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The reason this is a Must Own Spooky Tooth album is their sludge-metal cover of I Am the Walrus, guaranteed to blow your mind – it sure blows ours
  • Includes “Something to Say,” co-written by Joe Cocker and later featured on his 1972 album
  • 4 1/2 stars: “It’s a good, solid effort that includes a burning cover of the Beatles’ ‘I Am the Walrus.'”

This vintage Island Pink Label pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound. (more…)