More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings
- Torme’s 1957 release, here with solid Double Plus (A++) sound of BETTER throughout this vintage 70s Bethlehem reissue pressing
- Turn it up and The Velvet Fog will be standing right between your speakers, putting his heart and soul into these American standards
- Lovely richness and warmth, you may just find yourself using it as an analog Demo Disc – Mel is in his prime and magnificent throughout
- 5 stars: “Featuring an artist at the peak of his ability and talent, a collection of top-drawer songs from the best pop composers ever, and a swinging ten-piece that forms the perfect accompaniment, Sings Fred Astaire is one of the best up-tempo vocal albums ever recorded.”
The notes for the original pressing we played can be seen above. We’ve played them before with similar results, so I doubt we will be buying them in the future.
It’s not a bad sounding pressing — with grades of 1.5+ on both sides, it fits comfortably in our section for good, not great sounding LPs — but the right reissues from the 70s are a big step up in class sonically.
They represent yet another example of a vintage reissue — accent on the word “vintage” — handily beating the early pressings.
There are a number of budget reissues of vocal music with excellent sound that we’ve discovered over the years, and some of them, counterintuitively with respect to the conventional audiophile record collecting dogma from which many in our hobby suffer, are the best sounding versions that we know of.
What the Best Sides Of …Sings Fred Astaire aka …Loves Fred Astaire Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1957
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.