5-2018

Here’s How You Know You Have a Hot Stamper of Songs in the Attic

joelsongs600Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now

It’s the side you play through to the end.

When the sound is right you want to hear more.

Since the opening track of this record is one of the keys to knowing whether it’s mastered and pressed properly, once you get past the sibilance hurdle on track one, the next step is to find out how the challenges presented by the rest of the tracks are handled on any given pressing. Some advice follows.

Actually, what you really want to know is how good each song can sound — what it sounds like when it’s right.

Once the quality of the mastering has been established, the fun part is to play the rest of the album, to hear it really come alive.

Side One

Miami 2017

This is usually the brightest cut on the first side, commonly found with some sibilance problems. On the high-res copies the sibilance is lessened, and the sound of the sibilance itself is much less transistory and spitty, with more of a silky quality, which is simply another way of saying it’s less distorted.

Of course one wouldn’t want the sibilance to be lessened by having a dull top end, but few of these pressings are dull. Most of them suffer from a brightness problem. The best copies keep the sibilance under control and balance the upper mids with extended highs. Without extension on the highs the sound will tend to be aggressive.

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Listening in Depth to Candy-O

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now

This is one of our favorite recordings — a former member of our Top 100 — for one very simple reason: it’s got Big Rock Sound in spades! Drop the needle on Let’s Go and check out the sound of the big floor tom. When the drummer bangs on that thing, you will FEEL it! It’s similar to the effect of being in the room with live musicians — the difference between just hearing music and also feeling it. That’s what you get from a Hot Stamper copy.

What other New Wave band ever recorded an album with this kind of DEMONSTRATION QUALITY sound? It positively JUMPS out of the speakers. No album by Blondie, Television, The Pretenders or ANY of their contemporaries can begin to compete with this kind of sound, with the exception of the Talking Heads’ Little Creatures. The Cars very own first album is excellent, but it doesn’t have this kind of LIFE and ENERGY. No way, no how.  (more…)

A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night – The Video

 

For those of you who’ve never chanced upon it, here is the ‘live’ version of the album in five parts.

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

Nilsson was apparently too far ahead of his time. Rod Stewart recently [2002, twenty years ago!] made an album of classic popular music that went to number one and jump-started his second career.

Harry Nilsson understands this music so much better and sings it so much better than Rod Stewart ever could that it’s hard to understand the relatively poor sales of this much superior album.

Either that or the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate Nilsson as much as I do. Probably both I guess. Too bad. This album is better than all the “also rans” albums put together. (McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom was truly unlistenable, but what person of taste can take any of these albums seriously?)

Arrangements by Gordon Jenkins add to the sublime character of the music. Jenkins arranged many of the greatest albums of this kind ever recorded, including top titles by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and perhaps most famously for us audiophiles, Nat King Cole (the Number One album Love Is the Thing and three others).

The original CD, by the way, is so bright and thin it will make your ears bleed. The new one may be better, but it’s doubtful. If you like Harry Nilsson and you don’t have a turntable, you are pretty much out of luck my friend.

Derek Taylor, Producer

About two years ago [circa 1971], Harry and I were talking about songs, swapping titles, and testing memories. You know that game? Who wrote ‘Miss Otis’ and what year did Al Jolson die, and what else besides ‘As Time Goes By’ did Herman Hupfeld … write? We found a lot of marvelous songs with fine words. And what melodies! ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It),’ ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.’ Brilliant stuff, constructed with style and flair. One day Harry suggested ‘Why don’t we do an album of the old songs?’ and it was the best idea I’d heard since God only knows when. ‘You produce and I’ll sing,’ he said. And two years later – it’s November 1972 – he says it again, and this time it’s on.

— Derek Taylor

We Give Up on Chicago III, For Now Anyway

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

Don’t hold your breath for a Hot copy of this album — we just attempted a shootout and came up empty-handed. I doubt we’ll ever find a copy that does what we want it to.

UPDATE 2023

We finally did manage to do a shootout, and this is the copy that ended up on the site on a Hot Stamper pressing. As the response was underwhelming, Chicago 3 has been tagged as a never again title, a record you, dear reader, will have to find for yourself.

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Another Harry Nilsson Must Own Album

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Harry Nilsson Available Now

(Which Makes Four for Those of You Keeping Score at Home)

It’s yet another triumph from one of our favorite engineers, KEN SCOTT (Ziggy Stardust, Magical Mystery Tour, Honky Chateau, Crime of the Century and many more).

This is one of Nilsson’s best albums, sonically and musically. (With Ken Scott at the board at Trident Studios the sound has to be good, doesn’t it?) Side one is amazingly good from start to finish. On the two CD set of Nilsson’s greatest hits (which is excellent, by the way) almost all of side one from this album is used, as well as the best material on side two here, which includes Spaceman and The Most Beautiful World In The World. In other words, this album has more than half a dozen of the best songs Nilsson ever wrote.

Nilsson Schmilsson and the album simply titled Harry are the other two superb Nilsson records that I highly recommend. Harry is my favorite of all his albums, maybe because it was so different from anything that I’d ever heard up to that point. A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night is also a personal favorite. It’s an album of standards done in the Nilsson style, and it’s wonderful in every way.

So those four are the ones to own. We guarantee you will love each and every one or your money back.

By the way, if the documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) is on the box, you should definitely check it out. Most of us here have seen it by now and it’s a ton of fun. (more…)

What to Listen For on Hawaii’s Calling Me

More Vintage Columbia Pressings 

The Analog sound of this pressing makes a mockery of even the most advanced digital playback systems, including the ones that haven’t been invented yet. I’d love to play this for Neil Young so he can see what he’s up against. Good Luck, Neil, you’re going to need it.

We’ve been through dozens of Columbia albums from the ’60s since we discovered how good the Marty Robbins titles on Columbia can sound. Most of the popular vocal and country albums we play have an overall distorted sound, are swimming in reverb, and come with hard, edgy, smeary vocals to boot.

To find an album with freakishly good sound such as this involves a healthy dose of pure luck. You will need to dig through an awfully big pile of vinyl to uncover a gem of this beauty.

Vocals Are Key

Like any good Elvis or Nat “King” Cole record, the one quality that is far and away the most important is that the vocals must be full-bodied, rich and smooth. Without that sound, you might as well be playing a CD. This is precisely what both sides here give you – Tubey Magical richness in spades.

Note that the heavy reverb not only sounds right for this music and this era but actually sounds great, the very opposite of the hard, sour, metallic digital reverb that replaced it decades later.

Skip the Mono

Stick with stereo on this title; the monos aren’t worth anybody’s time (scratch that: any audiophile’s time). If you see one for a buck at a garage sale, pick it up for the music, and then be on the lookout for a nice stereo original to enjoy for the sound.

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How Do the Early Pressings of All or Nothing at All Sound?

More Billie Holiday

More Titles that Sound Best in Mono

I expected our amazing sounding original seen below to win the shootout, but it didn’t!

Also, the reprocessed fake stereo copy shown here is to be avoided at all costs.

It sounds as bad as any fake stereo record I can remember playing. What were they thinking?

Naturally, the highest quality vocal reproduction has to be the main focus on a Hot Stamper pressing for any Billie Holiday record we would offer. Her voice should be rich and tubey, yet clear, breathy and present.

In addition to being tonally correct and natural, the pressings we offer must also be highly resolving. With the right room and the right equipment, properly set-up and adjusted of course, you will hear everything that these vintage recordings have to offer, including the three-dimensional space of the studios in which the various sessions were recorded, under the auspices of Norman Granz.

The Sound of the Original

The original Trumpet Player Verve mono we had on hand to play suffered from an EQ problem we run into frequently in our shootouts for vintage vocal albums. Actually, to be clear, there were two main problems in the case of All or Nothing At All: a boosted midrange and occasional sibilance issues. (more…)