- You’ll find incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound throughout this vintage import copy of the band’s Prog Rock Masterpiece – just shy of our Shootout Winner
- We had a wide variety of Islands (Pink and Sunray) and UK Polydor pressings, and only two of those labels can have Hot Stampers based on the many shootouts we’ve done over the years
- On a pressing as good as this one, turned up to seriously loud levels, the horns blasting away on “21st Century Schizoid Man” are guaranteed to blow your mind
- Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
- 5 stars: “The group’s definitive album, and one of the most daring debut albums ever …. it blew all of the progressive/psychedelic competition out of the running, although it was almost too good for the band’s own good — it took King Crimson nearly four years to come up with a record as strong or concise.”
- We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. In the Court of the Crimson King is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but should get to know better
kingcinthe
In the Court of the Crimson King – An Overview
Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now
If you have the Atlantic pressing, from any era, you have never heard this record at its best. The better sounding domestic originals we’ve played are clearly mastered from copy tapes, which results in dubby sound.
In the Court of the Crimson King is such a well recorded album that even the sound quality derived from second-generation tapes is still better than most of what came out in 1969.
(By the way, 1969 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2026 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to play. To make it easier for audiophiles to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve also identified more than 25 Rock and Pop albums essential to any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.)
Now on to brass tacks.
UK Polydor Label
Passable, not really worth the labor to put them in a shootout just to have them earn sub-Hot Stamper grades. A1/B5 is a common stamper for these pressings and with those stampes the Polydor is not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.
Pink Label Island
The same can be said for some of the earliest UK Pink Label Island pressings. None of them has ever won a shootout and probably none of them ever will. (A number of Pink Label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)
The conventional wisdom which holds that original pressings are superior to reissues in this case turns out to be flat wrong.
The Pink Label pressings can be good, but we rarely buy them, our two best reasons being:
In the Court of the Crimson King – A Surprisingly Good Pressing from Mobile Fidelity
Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now
The MoFi pressing shown here is surely one of their best.
Unfortunately, these days we have little tolerance for the dynamic compression, overall lifelessness and wonky bass heard on practically every record they ever mastered. Including this one.
One of the reasons your MoFi might not sound bad to you is that it isn’t really “wrong” the way most Mobile Fidelity pressings are. It’s doing most things right, and it will probably beat most of what you can find to throw at it.
It’s lacking some important qualities, and a listen to one of our Hot Stampers will allow you to hear exactly what you’re not getting when you play an audiophile pressing, any audiophile pressing, even one as good as MoFi’s.
Side by side the comparison will surely be striking. How much energy, size, power and passion is missing from the record you own?
There’s only one way to find out, and it’s by playing a better copy of the album. (more…)