Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Ambrosia Available Now
This White Hot Stamper original LP goes BEYOND DEMO DISC sound. What that means exactly I’m not sure, but I know it when I hear it, and this record has THAT SOUND.
We had no choice but to award this side one the very rare A with FOUR pluses A++++. Side one of this copy has ENERGY and LIFE we have never heard before.
No other copy had this kind of OFF THE CHARTS sound on either side, which means we feel no compunction awarding this side one our Ultimate Rating of A Quadruple Plus (A++++). Only a handful of records over the course of the last few years have earned such a grade, certainly no more than ten, and if memory serves there has never been a record with Four Pluses on both sides; that would be just too extraordinary, the Black Swan incarnate.
- Our lengthy commentary entitled Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
- We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
- Nowadays we often place them under the general heading of Breakthrough Pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, reveal to us sound that fundamentally changes what we thought we knew about these often familiar recordings.
- When this pressing (or pressings) landed on our turntable, we found ourselves asking “Who knew?“
- Perhaps an even better question would have been “How high is up?”
This Side One
Going back to our best Hot Stamper Triple Plus contenders for the final shootout round, we dropped the needle on this one and it could not have taken three seconds to know that this copy was BEYOND amazing, truly in a league of its own.