Miscellaneous

How Can I Find My Own Hot Stampers?

Finding Hot Stampers is all about doing shootouts for as many different pressings of the same title as you can get your hands on.

This link will walk you through the process we’ve perfected over the last twenty years. If you’re an audiophile who wants to collect better sounding pressings, and learn a lot about records and audio in the bargain, doing shootouts is by far the best way to achieve your goals. As far as we’re concerned, it is the only sure way, since it helps take the unconscious biases and the guesswork out of the process.

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The Hollies Remember – On a Carousel (various session segments)

More Hollies

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Hollies

If only their recordings were better. Most of their early albums sound like they are playing on an AM radio.

Thanks god The Beatles were so well recorded (although I have to say With the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night are consistently thinner and brighter than they should be, and thinner and brighter than the albums that follow and Please Please Me before them).

10cc Is Not in Love

More of the Music of 10cc

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of 10cc

This was my first 10cc album, and I completely fell in love with it. Used to play it all the time.

Une Nuit A Paris, the suite that opens side one, is just an amazing demo track. As you may have read elsewhere on the site, it’s the kind of sound that requires a big powerful stereo to reproduce. Even back in the mid-70s I had speakers as tall as me that weighed 300 pounds apiece (the Fulton J, shown below), so playing a record like this was just a thrill.

It still is. I still love it. And I recommend it highly for those who are fans of the band. If you don’t know who 10cc are, this album and this band will probably make no sense to you, but if you have an open mind and like “art rock” from the ’70s, you might just really get a kick out of this one.

More on the amazing album that this song is found on, The Original Soundtrack.

Further Reading

Reviewers Weigh In on The Beatles in 1964 – Who Knew the Band Was This Awful?

“The Beatles are not merely awful, they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned-heads of anti-music.”

—William F. Buckley, Jr. , Boston Globe, Sept. 13, 1964

“Visually they are a nightmare…musically they are a near disaster…their lyrics are a catastrophe.”

—Newsweek, Feb 24, 1964

“The Beatles vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent.”

—Theodore Strongin , New York Times, Feb. 19, 1964

“The Beatles must be a huge joke, a whacky gag, a giant put on.”

—Donald Freeman, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1964

“Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance.”

—George Dixon, Washington Post, Feb 13, 1964

“Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well.”

—Los Angeles Times, 1964