Top Engineers – Ed Begley

Gabor Szabo / More Sorcery

More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Guitar

Reviews and Commentaries for Gabor Szabo

  • With two incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this original Impulse pressing is close to the BEST we have ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • This copy was bigger, richer and clearer, with less smear and distortion, and more Tubey Magic, than practically all others we played
  • Recorded in 1967, this vintage stereo pressing boasts exceptionally natural guitar sound, as well as note-like bass and the kind of energy you rarely get outside of a live performance
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “In 1967, guitarist Gabor Szabo had his finest working group, a quintet with the very complementary fellow guitarist Jimmy Stewart, bassist Louis Kabok, either Marty Morrell or Bill Goodwin on drums and percussionist Hal Gordon.”

This is a live recording that’s got that small jazz club feel. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” runs almost ten minutes and gives everybody involved a chance to stretch out. “People” is also exceptionally good here.

It’s hard to find a recording Szabo did that isn’t full of Tubey Magic, huge studio space and right-on-the-money instrumental timbres. This album is right up there with the best of his recordings, courtesy of the two top engineers noted below.

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Xavier Cugat – Chile Con Cugie

More Exotica

Living Stereo Titles Available Now

Amazing nearly White Hot stamper sound on side two. It’s so big and fun, jumping with energy in a huge space.

1959 Living Stereo three-dimensionality from Webster Hall.

Lots of exotica percussion and rhythm make for fun stereo listening. 

Side Two

So much bigger and clearer than we expected, with instruments just jumping out of the soundfield everywhere, this is the way you want your Xavier Cugat records to sound!

Big, lively and fun, that’s what an authentic original Living Stereo pressing can do that the modern record of today has such trouble recreating.

Side One

Tonally correct — maybe not all the fun of this amazing side two but a healthy portion of it.

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Debussy & Ravel / Julliard String Quartet – Reviewed in 2005

Near Mint SUPER RARE Demonstration Copy Shaded Dog of this Debussy and Ravel string quartet recording. 

I haven’t seen a clean one of these in probably close to ten years. This record looks like it has been played very little.

The sound is also very natural. Not bright or close miked — much more the way it would actually be heard in a smaller more intimate setting.

This is an older classical/orchestral review

Most of the older reviews you see are for records that did not go through the shootout process, the revolutionary approach to finding better sounding pressings we started developing in the early 2000s and have since turned into a veritable science.

We found the records you see in these older listings by cleaning and playing a pressing or two of the album, which we then described and priced based on how good the sound and surfaces were. (For out Hot Stamper listings, the sonic grades and vinyl playgrades are listed separately.)

We were often wrong back in those days, something we have no reason to hide. Audio equipment and record cleaning technologies have come a long way since those darker days, a subject we discuss here.

Currently, 99% (or more!) of the records we sell are cleaned, then auditioned under rigorously controlled conditions, up against a number of other pressings. We award them sonic grades, and then condition check them for surface noise.

As you may imagine, this approach requires a great deal of time, effort and skill, which is why we currently have a highly trained staff of about ten. No individual or business without the aid of such a committed group could possibly dig as deep into the sound of records as we have, and it is unlikely that anyone besides us could ever come along to do the kind of work we do.

The term “Hot Stampers” gets thrown around a lot these days, but to us it means only one thing: a record that has been through the shootout process and found to be of exceptionally high quality.

The result of our labor is the hundreds of titles seen here, every one of which is unique and guaranteed to be the best sounding copy of the album you have ever heard or you get your money back.

Further Reading