bloodblood-test

On Blood, Sweat and Tears’ Second Album, It’s All About the Brass

Blood, Sweat and Tears’ Second Album Is a Top Test Disc

UPDATE 2026

The commentary you see below was written around 2010.

In it we describe a mind-blowing pair of copies that were each awarded a grade of Four Pluses. There was one Four Plus side one on one copy, and a different copy had a Four Plus side two.

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.

This was one of those records, a true outlier. Out of fifty records, this was one of the two copies that took the sound (and music!) of one of the sides to places we had never heard it go before. We call these kinds of records breakthrough pressings. When you get paid to critically audition records for decades, all day, every day, you are bound to run into some from time to time. These are their stories.

Our Commentary from 2010 (Minor changes have been made.)

Our last big shootout was back in early 2008.

What we learned this time around for this album can be summed up in a few short words: it’s all about the brass.

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What to Do If a Favorite Record Changes Its Sound

Records We’ve Found Are Good for Testing

UPDATE 2026

This commentary was written around 2010. Note that we rarely have this title in stock, for the simple reason that these days it’s just too hard to find with the right stampers and good vinyl.

Our last big shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ debut was back in early 2008. Since we never tire of discussing the revolutionary changes in audio that have occurred over the last quite eventful year (really more like five quite eventful years) , we here provide you with yet another link to that commentary.

Suffice to say, this record, like most good records, got a whole lot better.

(Some records do not, but that’s another story for another day. If your audiophile pressings — especially these — start to sound funny, you are probably on solid ground. They sure sound funny to us.) 

This time around all the best qualities of the best copies stayed the same; this is to be expected.

If records you have known well, over a very long period of time, suddenly start to sound different*, you can be pretty sure that you’ve made an error of some kind in your system, room, electricity, setup or something else.

You need to find it and figure out how to fix it as quickly as possible, although as a rule this process can turn out to be very time consuming and difficult.

The first place I would look is to any changes you might have made in your wiring, whether speaker, interconnect or power cord. (Robert Brook has done some work in this area that you may find helpful.)

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The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Blood Sweat and Tears

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears Available Now

UPDATE 2025

This commentary was written about twenty years ago, back in the days when I could find clean 360 Label pressings of this album actually sitting in the bins of used record stores. The picture at the bottom says it all — I think we had more than forty copies to work through for our first shootout, pressings of the album that I had been buying (many from Robert Pincus, he was the B,S&T expert back then) since the late-80s. Blood, Sweat and Tears and I go way back.

You may notice that we rarely write about the album these days, and that’s simply because we are not able to find clean, early label pressings to play anymore. (The Red Label pressings can be good but they don’t come close to winning shootouts. Without at least some potential Shootout Winning copies, it makes no sense to do the shootout. The winners are the ones that pay for the losers, naturally, with some profit left over if things go as planned.)

Speaking of which: Our last shootout was quite a few years ago. If we somehow managed to luck into a few copies locally, it’s possible we could do the shootout tomorrow, but buying this title on Discogs and Ebay has been a nightmare, with upwards of 90% of the copies we buy ending up marked return to sender.

The cost in labor (and frustration) we incurred to pursue the album long ago forced us to move on, after plenty of swearing and licking of wounds of course. How is it that record sellers can be so oblivious to the scratches and wear on their consistently noisy vinyl offerings is beyond me.

For those of you who can’t devote the resources to finding a good copy on the Columbia 360 Label, the Gold CD put out long ago by Mobile Fidelity is excellent and well worth whatever you have to pay for it. And I mean that sincerely.

Our Old Commentary

In my opinion this is the BEST SOUNDING rock record ever made. I may be biased because I like the music so much, but played on a Big Speaker System a Hot Stamper pressing is nothing less than ASTOUNDING, the ultimate Demo Disc. It has the power of LIVE MUSIC.

You don’t find that on a record too often, practically never in fact. I put this record at the top of The Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time link (seen on the left) and said it was in a class of its own for good reason — IT IS IN A CLASS OF ITS OWN.

As I’ve noted before, this record is a milestone in the history of popular music. Not only is it The Most Successful Fusion of Rock and Jazz Ever. It’s also One of the Finest Recordings of Popular Music Ever.

The sound is nothing short of amazing. Just the drums alone are enough to win awards: the kick drum has real kick, the snare may actually be the best rock snare ever recorded, the cymbals shimmer like real cymbals; almost everything is right with this record. Especially the music.

Good Demo Disc, Good Test Disc Too

This is the kind of record that doesn’t fall into the good Demo Disc, bad test disc trap. It’s both a good Demo Disc and a good test disc; not too many records can make that claim. (Especially the kinds of records audiophiles tend to like.)

The good copies of this album sound good on almost any system. But the better systems reveal qualities to this recording that you are very unlikely to have ever heard on another record. That’s the Demo side.

On the test side, no matter what level your system is at, any change you make will be instantly obvious on this recording, for good or bad. Nothing can fool it. It’s too tough a test, the toughest I know of bar none. For this record to sound right, truly right, every aspect of its reproduction has to be at the highest level. Any shortcoming will be glaringly obvious. The record may still sound good, but it won’t really sound right. (Knowing what “right” means in this context makes all the difference in the world of course.)

One reason the turn up your volume test is such a great test — the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

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Outliers & Out-of-This-World Sound

More Outlier Pressings We’ve Discovered

This commentary was written about ten twenty years ago and has been updated more than a few times since.

A while back we did a monster-sized shootout for Blood, Sweat and Tears’ second release, an album we consider THE Best Sounding Rock Record of All Time.

In the midst of the discussion of a particular pressing that completely blew our minds — a copy we gave a Hot Stamper grade of A with Four Pluses, the highest honor we can bestow upon it — various issues arose, issues such as: How did this copy get to be so good? and What does it take to find such a copy? and, to paraphrase David Byrne, How did it get here?

  • 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 usually 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 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?”

Which brings us to this commentary, which centers around the concept of outliers.

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Listening in Depth to Blood, Sweat and Tears

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top 100 Titles Available Now

In my opinion this is the BEST SOUNDING rock record ever made. Played on a BIG SPEAKER SYSTEM, a top Hot Stamper pressing is nothing less than a thrill, the ultimate Demo Disc.

Credit must go to the amazing engineering skills of ROY HALEE. He may not be very consistent (Graceland, Still Crazy After All These Years) but on this album he knocked it out of the park. With the right copy playing on the right stereo, the album has the potential to sound like LIVE MUSIC.

You don’t find that on a record too often, practically never in fact. I put this record at the top of The Best Sounding Rock Records of All Time.

Side One

Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie (1st & 2nd Movements)

The song is always going to be plagued with a certain amount of surface noise. A solo guitar opening on a pop record pressed on Columbia vinyl from the ’60s? A brand new copy would have surface noise, so it’s important to not get too worked up over surfaces that are always going to be problematical.

Smiling Phases
Sometimes in Winter

This shootout taught me a lot about this track. There is a huge amount of bass which is difficult to reproduce; the best copies have note-like, controlled (although prodigious) bass which is a very tough system test.

Having said that, what separates the killer copies from the merely excellent ones is the quality of the flute sound. When you can hear the air going through the flute, and follow the playing throughout the song, you have a superbly transparent copy with all the presence and resolution of the best. If the flute sounds right, Katz’s voice will too. The sound will be Demonstration Quality of the highest order. Want to shoot out two different copies of this album on side one? Easy. Just play this track and see which one gets the flute right.

By the way, we LOVE the version of this song that Sergio Mendes does on Stillness. Eric Katz is a decent singer; the two girls in Brazil ’66 are SUPERB singers. The fact that they are female, that there are two of them and that they can harmonize as beautifully as any two singers you’ve ever heard allows their version of the song to have qualities far beyond the boys in Blood Sweat and Tears. But the BS&T guys make up for it by being REAL JAZZ MUSICIANS. Most of this album is real jazz played by top notch players. No other successful pop album to my knowledge can make that claim. In that sense it’s sui generis. But it’s unique in other ways as well, not just that one.

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Blood Sweat and Tears – The 30 Second Spinning Wheel Test

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears Available Now

This test is found in the track commentary for side two of our Hot Stamper listings for the album.

If you think you have a hot copy, see if yours does what our best copies do.

We also think that a record like this — a dynamic, full-spectrum recording, not overly concerned with detail — makes a much better Test Disc than the kind most audiophiles seem to prefer.

Patricia Barber it is not.

If you’re in the market for new speakers, take this record — or one like it — with you to the audition. Any speaker that can play this record properly deserves your consideration, or at the very least your respect.

In my experience not many speakers have what it takes to do this album justice.

The Blood, Sweat and Tears Spinning Wheel Test 

The first thirty seconds are key. Here is what you should be listening for.

Piano, Cowbell, Snare

Side two starts off with a bang; note that the piano has real weight to it right from the git go. When the cowbell comes in it should not sound muffled in any way (it’s a bell, don’t you know), quickly followed by the solid-as-a-rock-snare (the best on record.)

The Brass

On the killer copies that first blast of brass will be completely free of grain or grunge, yet the brass instruments themselves (trumpets and trombone) have all their leading edge transients, their “bite,” fully intact. They’re not in any way muffled or smeared, yet the sound is never aggressive. If anything, the brass is so free from distortion and so tonally correct it should actually sound smooth.

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