Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Badfinger Available Now
UPDATE 2025
This title, like all the best Badfinger records, is almost always noisy, which is why you will rarely find it on our site. Most of what we buy is just not quiet enough to sell.
We were finally able to do a shootout for Straight Up again in 2025, our first in fifteen years! There is one Hot Stamper pressing active on the site at the time of this writing, but it will most likely be gone soon.
Our Thinking Circa 2010
This relatively quiet WHITE HOT STAMPER Straight Up is KILLER, with a A++ side one and an A+++ side two — you can’t do much better than that! Side two has Master Tape Sound, the kind that we like to call AGAIG — As Good As It Gets. Both sides have the kind of PRESENCE in the midrange that most copies can’t begin to compete with. The sound here just JUMPS out of the speakers, which is exactly what the best copies of the album are supposed to (but rarely) do. For fans of the band — and Power Pop in general — this is the Straight Up you have been waiting for!
Our last shootout was in 2007, not because we don’t like the record or have customers for it; rather it’s the fact that clean copies of the album just aren’t out there in the bins the way they used to be. Two or three a year is all we can find, and that’s with hitting the stores every week.
2007 vs 2010
In 2007 we wrote: “Having played more than half a dozen copies of this record during the shootout I can tell you that the most common problem with Straight Up is grainy, gritty sound. Most copies of this record are painfully aggressive and transistory.”
With improvements to cleaning and playback i would say that’s not actually true in 2010. There is some grit to the sound to be sure, but like most records from the era, veiling and smearing are what really hold most copies back
Good copies of this record, ones that are mastered properly and pressed on “good” vinyl, sound a lot like a stipped down version of Abbey Road, which is what they’re supposed to sound like. That’s clearly the sound Badfinger and their producers George Harrison and Todd Rundgren (with some help from the Beatles’ engineer Geoff Emerick* ) were aiming at.
You will also hear some influences from All Things Must Pass and McCartney’s first . The music owes a lot to both The Beatles as well as Harrison and McCartney as individuals. What’s not to like? Catchy pop songs with grungy guitars — it’s ear candy when the sound is good, and the sound is very good here!
