Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Kooper Available Now
Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album, Child Is Father to the Man), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.
Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals can be a real problem on this album.
The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, the music on this album — like any rock and pop album — pretty much falls apart.
Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes.
On the better copies, the ones with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can crank the volume and let Super Session rock.
Testing with Super Session
This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.
- Grit and grain
- Midrange tonality
- Sibilance (it’s a bitch)
- Upper midrange brightness
Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, three or four times a year.
Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.
Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and think we know well.
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