Click Here to See Our Most Recent Review for a Real Gold Label Stereo Pressing of Forever Changes
The one person we can say for sure who must have absolutely no idea what a vintage pressing of the album is supposed to sound like is Chris Bellman. Allow us to make the case.
Below you can see our notes for the Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing of Forever Changes cut by Chris for Bernie Grundman Mastering in 2012.
We recently got hold of a copy locally and figured why not give it a spin and see how one of the most respected mastering engineers of the day, CB, fared with this apparently difficult to master title. (Others have tried and failed. See here and here.)
The Gold Label pressings are the only ones we buy these days. The Big Red E Elektras are passable at best, and everything after them is terrible, including imports and all the Heavy Vinyl reissues that we’ve had the misfortune to play over the years. We hope to be posting some of the stampers to avoid (we call them bad stamps) before too long.
Let’s get right into the sound of this 2012 remaster. We played the two tracks on each side that we’re most familiar with from doing shootouts for the title.
As the record played, to the best of our ability we made notes of the sound we were hearing: