beachchris

How Would You Ever Know This Was a Good Recording with these Crap Pressings to Play?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

You sure wouldn’t know this was a good recording by playing the crappy reissues Capitol put out on the Yellow Label in 1975.
We found that they tend to suffer from these sonic shortcomings:
They are either dark and recessed, and/or murky and smeary.

There are good Rainbow Label pressings and bad ones. We of course only sell the good ones.

Here is how we described our most recent White Hot shootout winner.
  • With two STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this early Capitol pressing could not be beat.
  • This copy gets the midrange right, and since that is where The Beach Boys’ voices are, that puts it ahead of everything else we heard.
  • What’s shocking to those of us who have played The Beach Boys records by the bucketful is how rich and open the best pressings of this album are.
  • You will have an awfully hard time finding another Beach Boys album that sounds as good as this one, and you may just find that it simply can’t be done.

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Letter of the Week – “…the sound of the vocals on this thing are just incredible!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I just had to write in appreciation of a killer Beach Boys pressing I bought from you last year. It’s so funny to me because it’s the Beach Boys Christmas Album, which is the kind of thing I’m sure audiophiles tend to dismiss.

But wow, the sound of the vocals on this thing are just incredible! So much presence and texture in them; and this from a mid-’70s pressing in stereo!

I only wish I could find more sound like this for the Beach Boys, especially from Pet Sounds, but that presents a completely different set of problems I’m sure.

Anyway, I was completely impressed by the A+ sound on these sides. I can only imagine what the White Hot Stamper holds in its grooves.

Ben

Ben,

Thanks for your letter. This is indeed one of the better sounding Beach Boys titles we’ve played. It might even be the best.

Is it surprising that it is a true stereo recording? Not to us it isn’t.

While leader Brian Wilson produced and arranged the rock songs, he left it to Dick Reynolds (an arranger for the Four Freshmen, a group Wilson idolized) to arrange the 41-piece orchestral backings on the traditional songs to which the Beach Boys would apply their vocals.

The album was released in mono and stereo; the stereo mix, prepared by engineer Chuck Britz, would be the last true stereo mix for a Beach Boys album until 1968’s Friends. – Wikipedia