a-good-reason

Chris Kimsey Engineered Two of My All Time My Favorite Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of Chris Kimsey Engineered Albums Available Now

I have two personal favorites among his many excellent recordings.

Both are Must Own records in my book. Masterpieces even.

Ten Years After – A Space in Time and Peter Frampton – Wind of Change.

If you have not heard one or both of these classics, check them out. They are the very definition of the kind of Big Production Rock I have been listening to since I first fell in love with them back in the early Seventies. That was about fifty years ago and I still play them regularly for enjoyment. I have never tired of either of them in all that time and I doubt I ever will.

I’m sure you have plenty of records you feel the same way about in your collection. These are two of mine.

They are the very definition of big speaker albums. The better pressings have the kind of energy in their grooves that is sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is the Audio Challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a system designed to play records with this kind of sonic firepower, don’t expect to hear them the way Chris Kimsey wanted you to.

Both albums want to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings are especially good at doing.

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An Overview of The Soft Parade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Our vintage Doors pressings — either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else will do — have the kind of Tubey Magical midrange that modern records are almost never able to reproduce.

Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

One of The Records That Did It For Me

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back over the last forty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with scores of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile in the first place, and stuck with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music you love sound so good?

It’s clearly an album we are obsessed with. We have written extensively about quite a number of them to date. It is our contention that to be any good at this hobby, you have to become obsessed with well-recorded albums and work out the consequences of those obsessions for yourself.

The Soft Parade was one of those albums that blew my fifteen-year-old mind. Songs for Beginners was another one.

We also wrote about the subject of being obsessed with music here. An excerpt:

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Obsession Is the Best Predictor of Audio Evolution

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now

Ambrosia‘s debut is an album we admit to being obsessed with.

It is our contention that to reach the most advanced levels of audio, you have to do two things.

First, you must become obsessed with getting your favorite albums to sound their best, and,

Second, you must then turn your obsession with those albums into concrete action.

What kind of action?

Finding better sounding pressings and improving your stereo and room.

We wrote about it here. An excerpt:

As a budding audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the ’70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was then using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists like them, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.

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Gino Vannelli, Big Speakers and The Amazing SP3A-1 Preamp

Advice on Making Audio Progress 

Storm at Sunup used to be my favorite Gino Vannelli album. I played it all the time back in the ’70s. It was one of a handful of recordings that made me want to pursue audiophile equipment in the hope that higher quality playback would allow the album to sound even bigger and more exciting.

It was pretty damn big and exciting already, but I wanted more. 

Right around that time I got my first audiophile tube preamp, the Audio Research SP3A-1, which replaced a Crown IC-150. As you can imagine, especially if you know the IC-150 at all well, playing this album through that state-of-the-art tube preamp was a revelation.

From then on there was no looking back. I started spending all my money on better and better equipment and more and more records. That was forty plus years ago and I haven’t stopped yet.

This is also the kind of recording that caused me to pursue Big Stereo Systems driving Big Speakers.

You need a lot of piston area to bring the dynamics of this recording to life, and to get the size of all the instruments to match their real life counterparts.

For that you need big speakers in big cabinets, the kind I’ve been listening to for more than forty years. (My last small speaker was given the boot around 1974 or so.) To tell you the truth, the Big Sound is the only sound that I can enjoy. Anything less is just not for me.

You will see this text in a lot of the records we review and sell:

This is a big speaker recording. It requires a pair of speakers that can move air with authority below 250 cycles and play at loud levels. If you don’t own speakers that can do that, this record will never really sound the way it should.

It demands to be played LOUD. It simply cannot come to life the way the producers, engineers and artists involved intended for it to if you play it at moderate levels.

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Graham Nash and Better Days – The Best Reason to Get Deeper into Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

This is one of the records that convinced me that I should enthusiastically and actively pursue high quality home audio. I realized pretty early on that I needed to devote the time, energy and money into improving my system so that I could play records like Songs for Beginners better and figure out how to get them to sound more like live music.

I had such irrepressibly deep feelings while listening to the album that I knew I had to do everything in my power to get it to sound as good as I possibly could.

Songs for Beginners is an album that made me want to become a better listener.

And the song that really did it for me on the album was Better Days.

I was originally thinking of calling this commentary “Why I Became an Audiophile,” but I quickly realized that being an audiophile — a lover of sound — doesn’t necessarily involve buying lots of expensive audio equipment or endlessly searching out recordings with the highest fidelity.

No, being an audiophile simply means you love good sound.

Where you find it — at clubs, at home, in the concert hall or the car — should make no difference to anyone.

Songs for Beginners couldn’t make me an audiophile; I already was one. It did, however, make me a more dedicated audio enthusiast. It’s precisely the kind of record that rewards the 40 plus years I’ve put into this hobby, trying to get it and hundreds, now thousands, of other wonderful records to sound their best.

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