Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now
If you’ve got the system to play this one loud enough, with the low end weight and energy it requires, you are in for a treat with Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s debut.
The organ that opens side two will rattle the foundation of your house if you’re not careful. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense. This is bombastic prog that wants desperately to rock your world. At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly. At loud levels, it actually will rock your world.
To play this record right, you should have, at a minimum:
- Big dynamic speakers, and they should be pulled out well into the room to create a three-dimensional presentation, in this case of a live rock concert. If the speakers are too big for the room, or stuck in the corners, you haven’t got a chance with a recording as powerful as this one.
- A large room. (Our new studio has a 12 foot ceiling, a big help with a blockbuster recording such as this one.)
- Strong walls with no windows, and, if possible, a concrete floor to keep the bass from leaving the room.
- Seating for a single listener far from any boundary, especially the back wall (a common problem with small-ish rooms).
- Extensive room treatments to deal with the loud levels this music requires.
- Enough amplifier power driving speakers with big enough woofers to move all the air in the listening room with authority.
- And, finally, high quality electricity, a heavily tweaked front end and all the rest of the audio stuff we discuss endlessly on this blog.
Without all of these things, it’s hard for us to imagine anyone could hear this record sound the way the artists and engineers wanted it to. Playing a record like this in a small room at moderate levels practically guarantees that the listener will not be able to hear what makes the best copies of this album so special.