luck

Better Sounding Records? Lucks Explains a Lot

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2024

This commentary was written many years ago. It concerns a subject which does not get nearly enough discussion in the audiophile community: the subject of luck in audio and records.

Back in the 70s I was very lucky to have bought some exceptionally good pressings of albums that quickly became personal favorites and have remained so ever since.

This album and others like it were the reason I chose to keep going deeper into audio, which, to be honest, pretty much sums up my life story.

No skill was involved in finding these records. No real knowledge either. It was all just dumb luck. Perhaps you will agree with me that much of life seems to work that way.

Silk Degrees

Most copies severely lack presence and top end. Dull, thick, opaque sound is far too common on Silk Degrees, which may account for some audiophiles finding the Half-Speed an improvement.

Despite all the bad sound I found for this album, I kept buying copies of this record in the hopes that someday I would find one that sounded good. I remember playing this record when it came out in 1976 and thinking that it sounded very good. So how is it that all the copies I’m playing sound so bad, or at the very least, wrong?

Well, the answer to that question is not too complicated. When you get the right pressing, the sound is excellent.

I must have had a good one 40+ years ago, and that’s why I liked the sound. Something similar happened to me with Ambrosia’s first album.

The copy I had picked up at random when I bought the album new in 1976 just happened to have very good stampers. (Keep in mind that we don’t like to call a record Hot until it has gone through the shootout process, a subject we discuss in some depth here.)

When you consider that Hot Stampers for both of those records are pretty unusual, I would say I was very lucky to get good sounding copies of those two masterpieces while everyone around me was buying crap.

To be clear, when I was buying these records, and even as late as when I wrote this commentary twenty years ago, I had much less revealing components and the much lower standards that typically accompany them.

(The longer I have spent in this hobby, the more obvious it is to me that the two go together. This tendency helps to explain, better than any other single reason — although lots of other things are involved — the audiophile preference for remastered pressings of questionable quality.)

So what do you hear on the best copies?

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Lucky for Us the First Copy We Played Was Outstanding

Hot Stamper Pressing of Living Stereo Titles Available Now

The first copy of the album I got my hands on and needle-dropped blew me away with its big, open, clear, solid orchestral sound.

Three years later, when we had enough copies to do this shootout, sure enough it won. That rarely happens — in a big pile of records there’s almost always something better than whatever we’ve heard — but it happened this time.

Imagine if I had played one of the bad sounding or noisy ones to start with.

It’s unlikely I would have been motivated to pursue the title and consequently the shootout we just did would have never happened. Lucky for us all that that first copy was so good.

These sides are “real” sounding, with a clean bottom and clean lower mids. Little to no smear. The sound is full-bodied and rich, yet clear and clean, and spread out on a huge stage – it’s yet another example of proper Orchestral Reproduction.

This is the kind of record that will make you want to take all your heavy vinyl classical pressings and put them in storage. 

Classic Records Release on Heavy Vinyl

It’s been quite a while since I played the Classic pressing, but I remember it as fairly typical of their mediocre-at-best catalog, tonally fine but low-rez and lacking space, warmth and above all Tubey Magic.

I don’t think I’ve ever played an original or a VICS reissue that didn’t sound better, and that means that the best grade to give Classic’s pressing is probably a D: below average.

When Classic Records was blowing out its unsold inventory through the Tower Records Classical Annex in Hollywood, this was a title you could pick up for under ten bucks. I remember it being $7, but my memory may not be correct.

And even at that price it seemed nobody really wanted it.  Which is as it should be. Heavy Vinyl or no Heavy Vinyl, a bad record is a bad record and not worth the bother of sitting down and listening to it.

If you own this record, my guess is it is MINT. If you played it, you probably played it once and put it away.

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