More of the Music of The Doors
This incredibly rare, exceptionally quiet Elektra Gold Label LP sounds AMAZING, As Good As It Gets (AGAIG)! The sound is BIG, RICH, and FULL-BODIED, exactly the way it should be.
As good as the Hot Stamper Big Red E Label copies can be, and that’s very good indeed, the right first pressing is still The King. It just can’t be beat.
The difference might only be 5%, but on a big dynamic speaker playing at loud levels that 5% can really give the sound the boost it needs to go over the top into crazy Demo Disc Land.
How rare is a clean, properly mastered gold label original like this? So rare this is THE FIRST ONE WE’VE EVER LISTED on the site! I think I run into one like this about every five years. Most of the gold label pressings we come across are full of groove distortion, covered with scratches and skips, and often have no top end left after being ploughed with a bad needle.
I’m sure the console stereo on which I first played my copy of The Soft Parade tracked at five or ten grams. The fine squiggles that carry the most delicate extended highs gets shaved off pretty quickly at that weight, and once they’re gone they’re gone for good. We never noticed because the frequency response of the speakers in those cabinets probably topped out at 6k, if that. (This is why so many dealers on Ebay don’t hear the surface noise on the beat up records they sell — no top end, no surface noise to worry about! Works out great for everybody except us audiophiles who actually care about the sound of our records, not just the color of their labels.)