Eddie Kramer, Engineer

Eddie Kramer Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums Engineered by Eddie Kramer Available Now

Eddie Kramer is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

Click on the links below to see our supply of Eddie Kramer engineered or produced albums, along with plenty of our famous commentaries.

Many can be found in our rock and pop Top 100 list of best sounding albums with the best music (limited to titles that we can actually find sufficient copies of with which to do our Hot Stamper shootouts).

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Jimi Hendrix – Rainbow Bridge

More Jimi Hendrix

  • This superb pressing of Rainbow Bridge boasts Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from top to bottom – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • A surprisingly good sounding album, one of the best of his posthumous releases
  • “‘Dolly Dagger’ is arguably one of the great pop songs of Hendrix’s career. Written towards the very end of his life, the song sounds like it was written years earlier, and it certainly has the same feel as many of the compositions on Hendrix’s debut, Are You Experienced?. Of course, Hendrix’s guitar work is inspired, but it doesn’t draw attention away from what is essentially a brilliantly crafted song.”

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Traffic – Mr. Fantasy

More of the Music of Steve Winwood

  • This outstanding Island British pressing boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from top to bottom
  • Big, full-bodied and lively, with huge amounts of space and off the charts Tubey Magic, the sound here is Hard to Fault – thanks Eddie and Jimmy!
  • “Winwood is simply incredible. He has a top group of musicians with him and they have made an album which is one of the best from any contemporary group.” – Rolling Stone, 1968
  • For our newest take on the sound of the various labels and stampers of Mr. Fantasy, please click here.

This is one of the best sounding Traffic records ever made. Musically it’s hit or miss, but so is every other Traffic record, including my favorite, John Barleycorn. The best songs here are Heaven Is In Your Mind, Dear Mr. Fantasy, and Coloured Rain. The first of these is worth the price of the album alone, in my opinion. It’s a wonderful example of late ’60s British psychedelic rock. (more…)

Donovan – The Hurdy Gurdy Man

More of the Music of Donovan

  • The Hurdy Gurdy Man finally returns to the site with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it throughout
  • Shockingly rich, spacious and lively, in the best tradition of vintage analog – Donovan’s recordings are hit and miss, but with Eddie Kramer at the controls, this one is clearly a hit
  • Among the supporting musicians were three soon-to-be members of Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page (who had already contributed to Donovan sessions in the past), John Paul Jones (likewise a veteran of sessions for Donovan), and John Bonham”
  • “… uplifting, accessible, pop-rock numbers with a splash of jazz or Caribbean flavor, rounding out an excellent album of the highest musicianship, lyric writing, and songcraft from an era.”
  • Some records are consistently too noisy to keep in stock no matter how good they sound. This is one of them.
  • We have a section for records that tend to be noisy, and it can be found here.

An outstanding pressing of what we consider Donovan’s best album, musically and sonically. The 1968 sound here is wonderful — rich, sweet, Tubey Magical and very, very Analog.

Donovan records tend to be hit or miss affairs, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could not find a bad track on either side of the album. Most are in fact quite wonderful.

Both Yellow Label Epics and Orange Label Epics fared well in our shootout. (We could find no Blue/ Black later labels to play.) Finding any pressing with clean surfaces was another matter, but we managed to have a pretty healthy group with which to do our shootout.

Some of these tracks may remind you more than a little of Pentangle. Danny Thompson, that band’s amazingly talented and unusually well recorded double bassist, just happens to be the bass player on the album. Go figure. Tony Carr does most of the drumming as he has on many of Donovan’s albums from the period. Needless to say, the rhythm section is first-rate.

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Led Zeppelin – 2 Originals of Led Zeppelin

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

This is a very old review from something like twenty years ago so take it with a very large grain of salt.

This is a Minty looking German Import Atlantic 2 LP set, consisting of Zep’s first two records. We dropped the needle on all four sides of this record and WOW! Side one of Zep II was SHOCKINGLY GOOD. Big bottom, lots of top, clean vocals — what more could you ask for? Our Rough Hot Stamper Grade: A+ or better. (Side two was more typical for this album, a bit recessed and flat. Oh well.)

On Zep I, again, side one was definitely the stand out. Very clean, punchy, smooth and sweet, and not smeary at all (which is unusual to say the least). Side two was a little midrangy and didn’t have the fullness and warmth that the best copies do.

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Bad Company – Run With The Pack

SUPERB SOUND on Hot Stamper 2-pack! This is not an easy album to find with audiophile sound, and since our best sides were less impressive on their flipsides, we paired up these two copies to give you incredible sound for the album from first note to last.

Side two of the second record is the real deal, with BIG, RICH and ROCKIN’ White Hot Stamper sound. Side one of the first record is nearly as good (A++ to A+++), boasting exceptional transparency, excellent balance and something we didn’t hear on most copies: ENERGY.

Far too many original pressings (the only ones we liked, the reissues sounded too dubby to be taken seriously) were overly compressed and lifeless. This bad boy brought the band to life like practically no other.

When we set out to do this shootout, our first for the album, there was no question in our minds that Run With The Pack had the potential to be a great sounding LP. Ron Nevison, the man behind the board for the first two Bad Co. releases, both of which can be shockingly good and certainly deserve a place on our Top 100, engineered this one as well, with Eddie Kramer mixing at Kendun. RWTP may not be quite up to the standards set by those two monster rock albums, but on the best copies RWTP delivers the Classic Rock weight and energy that our audiophile fans have come to expect from their better records.

Scratch that — what we should have said was the best sides deliver that sound. The first record here, with nearly White Hot Stamper sound, has a side two with anemic vocals and no top end to speak of. The tonal balance is so far off we just called it NFG and moved on to the next copy. Who wants to play a Bad Company album that sounds as thin as a bad CD?

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