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The Strings on Wishful Sinful Are a Tough Test

The Soft Parade is a tragically underrated album and a killer recording, with Demo Quality sound on the best pressings

A new test we found helpful on side two was the quality of the strings on Wishful Sinful.

Man, they can really get edgy and shrill on some copies. The best side two’s have them sounding high-rez, rosiny and (almost) smooth.

No two copies of an album will get those strings to sound the same. If you don’t believe us just pull out two copies and listen for yourself. You may be in for quite a shock. You can adjust your VTA (you can and should) until you find the maximum resolution, most body, most harmonic extension, as well as the most correct tonality on the strings, but after you do, you will still never get two different pressings to sound the same.

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The Doors / The Soft Parade

More of the Music of The Doors

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Doors

  • A Soft Parade like you’ve never heard, with seriously good Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides of this vintage Elektra pressing (only the second copy to hit the site in fifteen months)
  • Side one was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • If this price seems high, keep in mind that the top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1500
  • The sound is rich and lively, with solid brass and punchy drums – thanks, Bruce Botnick, where would The Doors be without you?
  • Full of great songs: “Touch Me,” “Runnin’ Blue,” “Wild Child,” “Wishful Sinful” and the amazingly trippy “Soft Parade” extended suite
  • “Much like a true ‘parade’ of an English fugue, the song morphs from Morrison’s a capella sermon-like intro to a Baroque ballad to a show tune-like section to the long rock outro, the music masterfully following the flowing, stream of consciousness lyric.” Hell yeah!
  • We’ve written extensively about The Soft Parade, and you can find quite a number of letters and commentaries for the album on this blog.
  • It’s my favorite by the group and one that was instrumental in helping me progress in this exasperating hobby we have chosen for ourselves.
  • As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stampers that consistently wins our shootouts for The Soft Parade.  Click on this link to see other titles with one set of stamper numbers that always come out on top

This Doors pressing (either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else would qualify as a Hot Stamper) has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

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An Overview of The Soft Parade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

Our vintage Doors pressings — either on the Elektra Gold or Big Red E Label, nothing else will do — have the kind of Tubey Magical midrange that modern records are almost never able to reproduce.

Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing any sign of coming back.

One of The Records That Did It For Me

Perhaps hearing Dark Side was what made you realize how good a record could sound. Looking back over the last forty years, it’s clear to me now that this album, along with scores of others, is one of the surest reasons I became an audiophile in the first place, and stuck with it for so long. What could be better than hearing music you love sound so good?

It’s clearly an album we are obsessed with. We have written extensively about quite a number of them to date. It is our contention that to be any good at this hobby, you have to become obsessed with well-recorded albums and work out the consequences of those obsessions for yourself.

The Soft Parade was one of those albums that blew my fifteen-year-old mind. Songs for Beginners was another one.

We also wrote about the subject of being obsessed with music here. An excerpt:

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What Happens When the Gold Label Doesn’t Have the Best Sound on Both Sides?

More of the Music of The Doors

It gets marked the sonic grade it earns.

If a Big Red E label pressing sounded better to us on side two, if it somehow managed to sound better than any of our Gold Label originals, then it would earn the top grade on side two.

Here is how we described a killer copy we had not long ago:

With a Triple Plus (A+++) shootout winning side two and a Double Plus (A++) side one, this copy is practically as good as it gets. The sound on this Gold Label pressing is incredibly powerful — big, rich, full-bodied, present and lively. It’s HUGE, RICH, and FULL-BODIED, exactly the way it should be.

But note that side two was clearly not as good as side one. Even the best early pressings cannot be relied on to get both sides right. The pressing above is proof. We discuss the issue in the commentary below.

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Listening in Depth to The Soft Parade

Hot Stampers of The Soft Parade

Letters and Commentaries for The Soft Parade

doorssoftinner

Our shootout from way back (2014) included a minty Gold Label pressing, which did reasonably well, but not great, on side one. Side two however was OFF THE CHARTS and won the shootout on that side handily. The fact that side one wasn’t a knockout is yet more evidence that individual pressings with the same label — even the “right” label — vary dramatically in sound.

In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

Tell All the People

Jim Morrison, a man with no professional experience as a singer before he formed The Doors, was blessed with one of the most beautiful baritones in the history of Rock and Roll. If his voice isn’t rich, full and Tubey Magical on this track, the sound on side one isn’t likely to be either. If that’s the case you are not in for an easy ride my friend. Chuck that sucker in the trade-in pile and move on.

Touch Me

There’s big bass on this track; you need to be able to hear it right from the start or this track is going to sound like it’s playing through a car radio.

Listen also for the texture on the strings. If you have that rare, tonally correct early pressing with a real top end, the strings won’t sound steely, strident or smeared (the three S’s, don’t you know).

Shaman’s Blues
Do It
Easy Ride

Side Two

Wild Child
Runnin’ Blue

Fiddle and mandolin (we thought it might be a banjo at first but we’re pretty sure it’s a mandolin; listen for strumming at the end) accompaniment on a Doors song? Hey, why not? Let the guys stretch out a bit.

That’s what this album is all about. They’re not trying to be Blood Sweat and Tears. They’re trying to add some new colors to their palette, and I for one am glad they did. (When they went back to the basics for Morrison Hotel, they turned in one of their weakest efforts ever, if not The Weakest.)

Wishful Sinful

Bruce Botnick Tubey Magic To Die For! Does it get any better for audiophiles than this?

Listen for the lovely timbre of the oboe, a featured element of this track. The orchestral arrangements here rival those of the legendary George Martin (himself an accomplished oboist). If large scale orchestral arrangements are good enough for The Beatles, how can The Doors be criticized for incorporating them into their music?

The Soft Parade

Ya gotta love that spoken word intro. Once you’ve heard it you’ll never forget it as long as you live. The best early copies (gold label or big red E) have echo bouncing off every wall of the studio endlessly.

The weight the best copies have below 250 cycles is where much of the studio ambience is. Play the typical leaned-out copy and all that space collapses.

The Soft Parade on Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of The Soft Parade Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

A Gold Label original pressing blew our minds many years ago, after which we wrote “Need I even mention how much better this copy sounds than the 180g version from the Rhino Box Set, digitally remastered by Bernie Grundman? That thing is just awful, possibly the worst sounding pressing I have ever heard.” 

The Gold CD Hoffman did for Audio Fidelity is very likely to be night and day better. So much for the concept of vinyl superiority. Not with Bernie at the helm anyway.

Rhino has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

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The Soft Parade – Our Shootout Winner from 2007

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.)

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Letter of the Week – “Never heard the Doors sound like this before”

Letters and Commentaries for The Soft Parade

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

Hey Tom,   

Tom, I have not listened to the other two yet, but I had to shoot you a quick email about the Doors Soft Parade. It is totally killer.

It’s for records like this that we pour money into high performance audio systems. Bravo! Never heard the Doors sound like this before.

It’s hard to describe that pressing. It has everything you could want in a vinyl LP. Huge wide and deep soundstage, Jim’s voice and each instrument in its own 3D place in the soundstage, phenomenal tonal balance over the entire range of the music, great texture of voice and instruments, real here-with-you presence and the decay of notes is for real. Yeah, you’re right, this one has the magic.

Ed M.

Ed, thanks very much for your letter. I think you did a great job describing the pressing we sent you.

Best, TP

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