mahavbirds

What to Listen For on Birds of Fire

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz-Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

Birds of Fire as a recording is not about depth or soundstage or ambience.

It’s about immediacy, plain and simple.

All the lead instruments positively jump out of the speakers — if you are lucky enough to be playing the right pressing.

This is precisely what we want our best Hot Stampers to do. In most cases, the better they do it, the higher their grade will be.

The main problem with this record is a lack of midrange presence. If the keyboards, drums and guitars are not front and center, your copy does not have the presence it should. On the best copies the musicians are right in the room with you. We know this for a fact because we heard the copies that could present them that way, and we heard it more than once.

Which of course gets to the reason shootouts are the only real way to learn about records.

The best copies will show you qualities in the sound you had no way of knowing were there. Without the freakishly good pressings you run into by chance in a shootout you have no way to know how high is up. On this record up is very high indeed.

A True Demo Disc

Birds of Fire is one of the top two or three Jazz/Rock Fusion Albums of All Time. In my experience, few recordings within this genre can begin to compete with the Dynamics and Energy of the best pressings of the album — if you have the Big Dynamic system for it.

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The Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire

More Mahavishnu Orchestra

  • This original UK import copy (only the second to hit the site in three and a half years) boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout – it’s so smooth and natural you can turn up your volume pretty much as loud as you like and really let it blast
  • If you were to own only one Fusion record, you could hardly do better than Birds of Fire
  • It’s hard to think of another record that rocks as hard, and it’s not even a real rock record!
  • 5 stars on Allmusic and clearly one of the All Time Greats in the world of Jazz/Rock, as well as the band’s masterpiece

This is the band at the peak of their powers and, no pun intended, on fire. This may be jazz, but it’s jazz that wants to rock. And on this copy, it rocks like you will not believe. The louder you play it the better it sounds.

Birds of Fire is one of the top two or three Jazz/Rock Fusion Albums of All Time. In my experience, few recordings within this genre can begin to compete with the dynamics and energy of the best pressings of the album — if you have the big dynamic system for it.

It’s hard to think of another record that rocks as hard, and it’s not even a real rock record. We find ourselves playing albums like Houses of the Holy and Zep II and Dark Side of the Moon for hour upon hour, with dozens of copies to get through, and we do it on a regular basis. If anybody knows “big rock sound,” it’s us. But can we really say that those albums rock any harder than this one? Birds of Fire is to Jazz what Zep II is to Rock — the ultimate statement by a band at the absolute top of their game.

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We Was Wrong About the Imports of Birds of Fire

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz-Rock Fusion Albums Available Now

In our shootout from 2021, we asked the question:

British or domestic?

The answer we gave was incorrect. At the time we wrote:

Both can be good in our experience. For a while we were convinced that the British originals were the way to go, but since then we’ve found domestic pressings that were their equal. We do the same shootouts over and over, and it’s not unusual for the rules to get broken. The records tell us their stories. Our job is to keep our minds and our ears open enough to hear what they are trying to say.

Now, in 2024, having just done the shootout, it’s clear to us that the early Brits are clearly a step up sonically over even the best domestics we have on hand. The domestics can earn a Super Hot (A++) grade, but it is unlikely — although you never know! — that they will earn the third plus it takes to win a shootout.

Live and learn is our motto, and progress in audio is a feature, not a bug, of record collecting at the most advanced levels.

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