1978

Grateful Dead – Shakedown Street

 

  • This original Arista LP earned Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades – you’ll have a hard time finding a copy that sounds remotely as good as this one does – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Midrange magic that’s no doubt missing from whatever 180g reissue has been made from the tapes (or, to be clear, a modern digital master copied from who-knows-what-tapes)
  • Grateful Dead fans and completists will surely want to add this to their collection – it’s As Good As It Gets
  • “The rough-edged blues of “I Need a Miracle” and the Caribbean-tinged “Fire On the Mountain” would become set list staples, and their Latin-flavored version of The Rascals’ ’60s rock classic “Good Lovin'” is one of the band’s most beloved covers.” Amazon

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Gino Vannelli / Brother to Brother – A Desert Island Disc

More of Our Favorite Titles from 1978

I love this album! It’s very pop, beautifully arranged, the kind of popular music they just don’t make anymore. Four stars in my book!

Gino doesn’t get a lot of respect, but he has plenty of talent and his music still holds up today.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Brother to Brother is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but would be well advised to get to know better.

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Camel – Breathless – Our Shootout Winner from 2011

This Decca original UK pressed LP has BETTER than Super Hot Stamper sound on BOTH sides. It finished just a half grade behind the best one we played, and we played close to ten copies for our shootout, all British imports, so that should tell you this is a very special pressing indeed.

If you like your Prog with Pop flavorings, more Supertramp than King Crimson, you may find yourself liking Camel more than you thought you would. I was never a fan of the original iteration of the band, but both this album and Rain Dances, the one previous, have much to offer — if you like this sort of thing.

If you don’t, hard to imagine you starting now. I grew up on this music and find it quite enjoyable to this day.  (more…)

Van Halen – Self-Titled

More Van Halen

Reviews and Commentaries for Van Halen

  • This outstanding copy of the band’s debut album boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides here are smooth, rich and Tubey Magical, with soaring guitars and huge choruses that really get loud 
  • One of the most powerful rock recordings of its day (if you get one that sounds like this)
  • 5 stars: “They sound vital, surprising, and ultimately fun — and really revolutionary, because no other band rocked like this before Van Halen, and it’s still a giddy thrill to hear them discover a new way to rock on this stellar, seminal debut.”

Turn up your nose if you like, but this music is widely considered classic rock by now. I’m not going to pretend it’s on a level with After The Gold Rush or Zep II, but this album does exactly what it’s trying to do — it really ROCKS. (more…)

B.B. King – Midnight Believer

More B.B. King

More Electric Blues

  • An outstanding copy of Midnight Believer with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • Rich and full-bodied, clean, and clear, while the bass is big and punchy, and the energy level is off the charts
  • B.B. is backed by members of The Crusaders here, and on a copy like this one you can really get a sense of just how much they contribute to this music
  • “Another collaboration that worked a lot better than one might have expected. King and the Crusaders blended in a marginally funky, contemporary style for the buoyant ‘Never Make Your Move Too Soon’ and an uplifting ‘When It All Comes Down.'”

B.B. is backed by members of The Crusaders here, and on a copy like this one you can really get a sense of just how much they contribute to this music. The best sides have the kind of rich, full tonality and extended low end we just don’t hear often enough!

You can be sure this will beat the pants off the Direct Disc Labs Half-Speed Mastered pressing, or your money back. It’s no wonder they wanted to do an audiophile pressing of the album — it’s a superb recording. But mastering it at half-speed is not the answer. Finding one like this that has the LIFE of that master tape pressed into its grooves is the only way to be sure you will get real audiophile sound, not that pseudo kind we bash all over the site. (Sorry, we just can’t help it.) (more…)

Andrew Gold – All This and Heaven Too

More Andrew Gold

Asylum – A Label We Love

Superb engineering by Greg Ladanyi (Toto 4, The Pretender, El Rayo-X, demo discs one and all). Contains the monster hit Thank You for Being a Friend. AllMusic gives this one 4 1/2 Stars. It’s also the last good album our fab friend made.  

Andrew Gold is another talented popster who got little respect from the critics, or the public for that matter. His music has a lot of the same qualities as Buddy Holly’s: simple catchy tunes about love, with clever lyrics and tons of hooks.

If you know the “Asylum Sound” — think of the Tubey Magical Analog of The Eagles first album and you won’t be far off — you can be sure the best copies of All This and Heaven Too have plenty of it. Rarely do we run into recordings from the mid- to late-’70s with richer, fuller sound. The bass on the best copies is always huge and note-like. In the ’80s the very engineer for this record, Greg Ladanyi, would produce solo albums for the likes of Don Henley with no bass. How this came to be I cannot begin to understand, but record after record that we play from that decade are bright and thin like a transistor radio. This accounts for why you see so few of them on the site.

But Andrew Gold’s albums from the later ’70s are amazingly rich and tubey. That sound never went out of style with us. In fact albums with those sonic qualities make up the bulk of our sales, from The Beatles to The Eagles, Pink Floyd to Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel to Graham Nash. In our world the more “modern” something sounds the lower the grade. (more…)

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio / Blues to East – Reviewed in 2015

More of the Music of Tsuyoshi Yamamoto

On this album there’s almost none of that “introspective noodling jazz” that the Japanese are infamous for. I love Midnight Sugar as much as the next guy, but too much of that kind of music is wearying. 

Yamamoto’s Trio wants to show that it can play good old fashioned straight ahead American piano jazz with the best of them. I hear echoes of Bill Evans in Yamamoto’s playing. Supposedly he was a big Errol Garner fan as well.

You will also be hard pressed to find better sound for a small ensemble like this. Since Rudy Van Gelder was not particularly adept at recording the piano, many of the great jazz pianists cannot be heard properly on their Prestige, Blue Note and other label recordings.

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Bach, Mendelssohn, Widor / Discovery / Welch

More of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

This is an INCREDIBLY RARE Wilson Audio LP in IMMACULATE condition, with works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Widor and others.

This is actually an amazing sounding record. I’ve owned a copy for over 20 years. It’s some of the best sounding organ music with the deepest bass I’ve ever heard.

Yamashita / Romance de Amor – A Very Good Sounding RCA Direct to Disc Recording

Hot Stamper Audiophile Recordings

Reviews and Commentaries for Direct to Disc Recordings

This very nice looking RCA Direct-to-Disc LP of guitar music has excellent sound. 

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.

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