Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul Simon Available Now
Where did this thick, dull, bloated, opaque turd come from?
Having played at least 50-75 copies of the album over the last ten years, I can honestly say I have never heard one that sounded like this new version (maybe some record club copy we picked up by accident did, can’t say it never happened).
Can that possibly be a good thing?
Well, in favor of that proposition, I guess you could say it sounds less like a CD now.
On the other side of the ledger, it now sounds a great deal more like a bad LP.
We listen to piles of pressings of Graceland regularly. We know what the album generally sounds like, the range from bad to good, and we know what qualities the very best copies must have in order to win one of our shootouts.
Above all the one thing Graceland has going for it sonically is CLARITY. It can be open and spacious, tonally correct, with punchy, tight bass and present, breathy vocals. The best of the best copies have all these qualities, but the one quality any good copy must have is clarity, because that’s what’s good about the sound of the record. Without clarity the music doesn’t even work.
The new version has been “fixed.” It got rid of all that pesky grit and grain and CD-like sound from the original digital mix by simply equalizing them away.
Cut the top, cut the upper mids, boost the lower mids and upper bass and voila – now it’s what Graceland would have sounded like had it been all analog from the start, AAA baby!
Or at least analog for those who don’t know what good analog sounds like.
But it never was all analog, and trying to make it sound that way just ruins the one quality that it actually had going for it — clarity.
VTA
You can adjust your VTA and other table settings until you’re blue in the face, you’ll never get this pressing to sound right, and you’ll certainly never get it to sound very much like any Sterling original pressing I’ve ever heard.
The digital spit and grit is still there, under the darker EQ. And now it’s even worse — Simon’s voice has a thick, dull blanket over it, but you can still hear the spit underneath it.
You could probably take the CD and equalize it to sound like this record. But what would be the point?
The Bright Side
Well, perhaps there is a point to this equalization madness.
The CD already exists. It has a sound.
The original record has a sound too, and it’s a fairly common LP in the used bins. You could buy two or three for not that much money and try to find one you like better than the vinyl version you probably already own.