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James Taylor – Sweet Baby James

More of the Music of James Taylor

  • An early Green Label pressing with seriously good sound for this inarguable JT Masterpiece, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • All that lovely echo is a dead giveaway that side one of this pressing has resolution far beyond that of the others you may have heard (and of course the Rhino Heavy Vinyl), and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • Richness and body and Tubey Magic are every bit as important – when those big choruses kick in, you want the sound of all those singers to be as big as life without the strain that accompanies their voices on so many copies
  • Finding early pressings without marks or groove damage is no mean feat these days, but here’s one to prove it can be done
  • Top 100 and 5 stars: “Sweet Baby James launched not only Taylor’s career as a pop superstar but also the entire singer/songwriter movement of the early 70s that included Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, and others…”
  • If you’re a James Taylor fan — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this title is clearly one of the best albums released in 1970 and a true Must Own for the singer-songwriter-loving audiophile

Vocal reproduction is key to the better sounding copies of Sweet Baby James, as it is on so many singer-songwriter albums from the era.

To find a copy where Taylor’s vocals are front and center — which is exactly where they should be — but still rich, sweet, tonally correct and Tubey Magical is no mean feat. Only the better copies manage to pull it off.

Out of the dozen or more Green Label early pressings we play every year, relatively few have the full complement of Midrange Magic we know the best copies can have. As a rule of thumb, the hotter the stamper, the better the vocal reproduction on that copy.

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Listening in Depth to Sweet Baby James

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Before you play one of our Hot Stamper pressings, be sure to have your system fully warmed up and tweaked to perfection. Then turn up the volume good and loud. You’re about to hear some amazing music with superb sound. For me, and I hope you, when it comes to music this good, nothing less will do.

Side One

Sweet Baby James
Lo and Behold
Sunny Skies

James’ voice and the acoustic guitars should be warm, sweet, and surrounded by ambience. On a good copy, one that gets this song right, it’s pure milk and honey.

Steamroller

A big production number with rockin’ guitars and big brass. Some copies will be too bright and aggressive when the horns come in, and the majority of those that aren’t will be too dull on the other tracks. Only a copy with superb tonal balance will sound correct for both the rockers and the ballads.

Country Road
Oh Susanna

For some reason this song is too loud relative to the others on side one, so if you want it to sound right we recommend you bring the volume down a notch or two. (Those of you with a remote on your preamp finally have a good use for it.)

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Letter of the Week – “For me it is like the difference between 2-D and 3-D”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom, 

As a newcomer to your business, and to the entire concept of “Hot Stamper” records, I was naturally skeptical. Many of us have invested in a wide variety of vinyl that simple failed to live up to expectations. Initially I was going to order one and only one record from you, and test your bold promises. Instead, I ended up ordering a nice variety to truly put it to the test… investing a couple thousand dollars on faith. In short, I am now your customer for life.

As a point of reference, my system includes a pair of Wilson Audio Alexia powered by 2 monoblock McIntosh tube Amps and a Mc-tube preamp. Most importantly, a Brinkmann mag drive turntable with a Sumiko low output moving coil cartridge. So, not the world’s best system, but enough to discern what is to follow.

I ordered the following:
* Carole King Tapestry, ((White Hot Pressing)
* The Doobie Brothers, What Were Once Vices (White Hot Pressing)
* James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (White Hot Pressing)
* Paul McCartney, McCartney (Super Hot Pressing)
* Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Donald Fagen, The Nightfly (White Hot Pressing)

I warmed up my amps with the tuner for an hour or so and then sat and listened to some of my other records and reacquainted myself with the music from my system. First up was “What Were Once Vices…”. It was immediately apparent that I was getting a range as wide, if not wider than anything I had ever heard from my stereo. Then when I got to the last song on side one, “Road Angel” the guitar and drum interplay in the instrumental jam completely blew me away. Midway through I took the volume from loud to louder, and it exposed nothing but pure, sweet rock and roll. Literally gave me goose bumps.

I then listened to “Countdown to Ecstasy” and in this instance I owe a clean original copy, so I put it to the test. Back to back. I did not have to go past “Bodhisattva” to know it was no contest. If I had to apply a percentage, something like 20% more music comes from the Hot Stamper, and this (like all of my orders) is one of my all time favorite albums.

I won’t go on and on, suffice to say that the experience repeated itself on all of the above.

Even the Fagen copy was WAY better than the 1982 MoFi copy I paid an arm and a leg for. I have always thought that record had a true analog quality, was surprised the first time I learned it was laid down on a digital track. The Hot Stamper even adds to this great sounding record.

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Can Anybody Tell Me What’s Wrong with Sweet Baby James on Warners-Rhino?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

There is one obvious and somewhat bothersome fault with this new pressing of Sweet Baby James, an EQ issue. Anybody care to guess what it is? Send us an email if you think you know.

Hint: it’s the kind of thing that sticks out like a sore thumb, the kind of obvious EQ error I can’t ever recall hearing on an original pressing, as bad as many of those tend to be.

Our review for the Steve Hoffman remastered pressing follows.

This Warner Brothers 180g LP is the BEST SOUNDING Heavy Vinyl reissue to come our way in a long long time. Those of you who’ve been with us for a while know that that’s really not saying much, but it doesn’t make it any less true either, now does it? Let’s look at what it doesn’t do wrong first.

It doesn’t sound opaque, compressed, dry and just plain dead as a doornail like so many new reissues do. It doesn’t have the phony modern mastering sound we hate about the sound of the new Blue. (We seem to be pretty much alone in not liking that one, and we’re proud to say we still don’t like it.)

The new Sweet Baby James actually sounds like a — gulp — fairly decent original.

The amazing transparency and dynamic energy of the best originals will probably never be equalled by an audiophile pressing like this. (It hasn’t happened yet and we remain skeptical of the possibility.) Considering that this pressing is sure to beat most reissues, imports and such like, we have no problem heartily recommending it to our customers, especially at the price.

Hoffman and Gray can take pride in this Sweet Baby James.

It’s some of the best work I’ve heard from them to date. If more DCC and Heavy Vinyl reissues sounded like this, we wouldn’t be so critical of them. Unfortunately they don’t, and there are scores of pages of commentary on the site to back up that statement for those of you interested in the subject.

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For Rock and Pop, 1970 Might Just Be the Best Year of Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings from 1970 Available Now (All Genres of Music)

1970 turned out to be a great year in music. I wouldn’t want to be without any of the 17 albums listed below.

Cat Stevens Tea for the Tillerman,

Bridge Over Troubled Water,

Moondance,

Alone Together,

Tumbleweed Connection and the Self-Titled Album,

Sweet Baby James,

After the Goldrush,

Paul McCartney / McCartney,

Stephen Stills / Self-Titled,

Van Morrison / His Band And Street Choir,

Deja Vu,

Workingman’s Dead,

Tarkio,

Stillness,

Let It Be,

Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

Fleetwood Mac – Kiln House

and there are surely many other Must Owns from 1970 we could name if we simply took the time to list them.

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For Our 2008 Shootout We Had to Work Through 67(!) Copies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

UPDATE 2020

As you may have guessed from the title of this review, it was written in 2008, fairly early in our shootout history. We had been buying Sweet Baby James for decades, and by 2008 it was time to dive in to this classic from 1970, a landmark recording that single-handedly created a new genre, the singer songwriter album.

Our Review from 2008

It took three days, sixty seven copies, and multiple rounds, but SWEET BABY JAMES HOT STAMPERS ARE HERE.

Both sides of this bad boy are DEMO QUALITY and ABSOLUTELY STUNNING. Add in the fact that the vinyl is unusually quiet and you’ve got one heck of a copy here.

It ain’t easy to find copies of this album with great sound on both sides and reasonably quiet surfaces — that’s why you haven’t seen more than one Hot copy hit the site since February 08. 

This was one of the most massive shootouts in Better Records history.

We started out with SIXTY SEVEN copies. After weeding out the copies with obvious condition problems and known second-rate stampers, we were left with three dozen copies to audition.

We battled through condition problems, bad stereo days [a thing of the past since we figured out how to make sure our electrical feed was as uncorrupted as possibe], and listener fatigue to end up with a select number of exceptional copies. 

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