doobicapta

It Took Us Three Attempts to Get The Captain and Me Going

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

UPDATE 2026

By 2009 I had been randomly buying clean copies of The Captain and Me for two decades, with the expectation that one day I would play them and find the mysterious deadwax and other clues that would lead me to the potentially best sounding copies.

Even though I had learned a fair bit about stamper numbers by that time, there was no getting around the fact that the best stamper numbers cannot be predicted for any given title. I didn’t know any especially good ones, which means that I needed to learn them for this title the way I learned them for all the others — one album at a time.

As I was not a fan of the pre-McDonald Doobies, I confess I really had no idea what to look for. I probably had picked up a few of the exceedingly rare Green Label pressings, but were they the best? I couldn’t say. I just hadn’t spent enough time with the album. And I had disproved that old canard that the originals are always the best sounding so many times by then that believing that nonsense was out of the question.

We had tried twice before to get something going, but could not find the sound we were looking for and had simply given up and moved on to greener pastures. This is long before Prelude Enzyme Record Cleaning System had come our way in 2007. It, along with our Odyssey record cleaning machine and some other tricks we learned about record cleaning, allowed us to get a shootout going a couple of years later.

The failed attempts to understand the album mentioned above happened long before we had turned the business over to carrying out shootouts all day, every day, which is all we were doing by 2009. We had stopped promoting Heavy Vinyl in 2007, and by 2009 we were on our way to selling nothing but records we had cleaned and played and evaluated for their sound quality with our own ears.

Eventually we sat down with the copies of The Captain and Me that we had — more than thirty according to the listing you see below, the one we wrote at the time — and gave it our best shot.

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The Doobie Brothers – The Captain and Me

More of the Music of The Doobie Brothers

  • A vintage Green Label pressing with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish
  • Our last shootout was many years ago – since that time we have been pursuing every Green Label early pressing we could find, but the vinyl from that era has been fighting us every step of the way as you can see from the condition grades
  • So this is it folks – if you want the best sound, your only option is to put up with some surface noise
  • “Natural Thing,” “China Grove” and “Long Train Runnin'” all sound amazing – smooth, rich and full of energy
  • Credit Donn Landee with the full-bodied, rich, smooth, oh-so-analog sound of these Hot Stamper pressings
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records, but once you hear just how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The Doobie Brothers’ third long-player was the charm, their most substantial and consistent album to date, and one that rode the charts for a year.”

There are some great songs on this album, songs that still get plenty of play on the radio: China Grove, Long Train Running and South City Midnight Lady all come to mind. It’s tough to find great sounding copies, but it’s worth all the trouble when you get one with this kind of rich, full tonality, punchy bottom end and real space and ambiance. (more…)

Compromised Recordings Versus Purist Recordings – If It’s About the Music, the Choice Is Clear

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

That guy you see pictured to the left has spent much of the last forty years wandering around used record stores looking for better records (ahem). Before that he wandered around stores selling new records because he didn’t know how good old used records could be.

Here are some of the things he’s learned since he started collecting at the age of ten sixty years ago. (First purchase: She Loves You on 45. It’s still in the collection, although it cracked long ago and is no longer playable.)

This commentary was written circa 2006. The Hot Stamper world was very different then. A few dozen had been done since 2004, and probably not nearly as well as we thought at the time, truth be told.

A while back one of our good customers wrote to tell us how much he liked his Century Direct to Disc recording of the Glenn Miller big band, one of the few really amazing sounding direct discs that contains music actually worth listening to. Which brought me to the subject of Hot Stampers. 

Hot Stamper pressings are almost always going to be studio multi-track recordings, not direct to discs of live performances.

They will invariably suffer many compromises compared to the purist approach of an audiophile label trying to eliminate sources of distortion in the pursuit of the highest fidelity.

But when they do that, they almost always fail. How many Direct Discs sound like that Glenn Miller? A dozen at most. The vast majority are just plain awful. I know, I’ve played practically every one ever made. For more than a decade I made a living selling them.

Thankfully that is no longer the case, although we do have a handful of direct discs that we still do shootouts for, such as The Three, Glenn Miller, Straight from the Heart and the odd Sheffield.

Compromised Recordings

What we do play is those very special, albeit compromised, mass-produced pressings. The right Londons and Shaded Dogs. Columbia and Contemporary jazz. Brewer and Shipley. Sergio Mendes. The Beatles. The Doobie Brothers for Pete’s sake!

Why? Because those pressings actually communicate the music. They allow you to forget about the recording and just listen. You can’t do that very often with the CD of the album. You can’t even do it with most of the vinyl pressings you run into. You certainly can’t do it with the vast majority of 180 gram LPs being made today, not in our experience anyway.

You have to have the right pressing. That’s what a Hot Stamper is: more than anything else, it’s the right pressing.

It’s the one that really lets the music come through, regardless of whatever compromises were made along the way.

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The Captain and Me – A Nautilus Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of The Doobie Brothers Available Now

We actually recommended the Nautilus Half-Speed in the old days, but the last time we played one (2012 maybe?) the sound was Pure Audiophile BS — compressed to death and totally whomp-free.

The average domestic copy is terrible too, but that’s no reason to recommend this crappy remaster.

Stick to the green label originals.  They can rock with the best of them.

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