Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
Hot Stampers are all about finding those rare and very special pressings that manage to represent the master tape at its best.
Notice I did not say ACCURATELY represent the master tape, because the master tape may have faults that need to be corrected, and the only way to do that is in the mastering phase.
I can tell you without fear of contradiction that fidelity to the master tape should never be — and rarely is — the goal of the mastering engineer.
Which, as a practical matter, means two things:
- Flat transfers are often a mistake.
- Talking about the fidelity you think a record has to its master tape, a tape you have never heard, is completely pointless.
Whether we like or dislike the presentation of any given recording is of course a matter of taste. When listening we constantly make judgments about the way we think the recording at any moment ought to sound, based on what we like or don’t like about the sound of recordings in general and how our stereos deal with them.
Naturally, audiophiles listen for different qualities in a recording and ascribe to the different qualities they hear higher and lower values based on their personal taste. When doing our Hot Stamper shootouts, we do the same. Through our commentaries we try to communicate as clearly as possible the special qualities of the pressings we played and what they meant to us.
So what are we listening for on Zuma, specifically? Two qualities above all others.
Tonality
First off, correct tonality is critically important. For an audiophile this should go without saying. It is virtually (virtually but not quite) the sine qua non of reproduced sound.
Dynamics and Energy
We prize dynamics and the overall energetic quality of recordings more than transparency, Tubey Magic, sweetness and other audiophile favorites, even though we think those are very important qualities in a record. For us a transparent, sweet, lifeless record is no fun, hence our emphasis on energy and dynamics (and our disdain for Heavy Vinyl, which in our experience almost always lacks energy, along with lots of other things of course).
We like the Big Speaker sound — the kind of sound that, when at the right level, makes you feel like you’re in the presence of live music. That means the sound must be dynamic, immediate and full-range. Small speakers, screens and their ilk can do some nice things, but they can’t move much air, so for us they fail to convey a true sense of the power and energy, the “liveness”, of a recording the way dynamic drivers can (assuming of course the drivers are big enough and you have enough of them).
Room treatments play a vitally important role here of course. Untreated or poorly treated listening rooms constantly fight the speakers’ efforts to play louder without distortion. The room is the bottleneck, yet because the problem is not correctly identified, nothing is done to solve it. (I was heavily into audio for twenty years before I figured this out.)
Music has the power to take you out of the world you know and place you in a world of its own making. How it can do that nobody knows. Whatever Neil tapped into to make it happen on Danger Bird, he succeeded completely. If you’re in the right frame of mind, in the right environment, with everything working audio-wise, a minute into this song you will no longer be sitting in your comfy audio chair. You won’t really know where you are, and that’s exactly the best place to be. You’re in Neil’s world now, the world he created for you with his song.
Transcendental Recordings
To accomplish this feat the sound has to be right. As always, this is the rub. If you’re an audiophile these transcendent experiences tend to be prompted by very high quality recordings, the kind that let you forget you’re listening to a recording at all.
Many recordings do the reverse: they call attention to their shortcomings. When that happens the effect of losing oneself in the music quickly becomes so difficult as to be all but impossible. The spell is broken.
Ruined Recordings
Of course I’m using the word “recording” very loosely here, the way everyone does.
We have no idea what the recording sounds like.
All we have are pressings, and the fact of the matter is that most recordings are ruined in the mastering and pressing phases.
How else to explain how a Hot Stamper pressing like this can sound so amazing, yet the average copy sounds so, well, average? Which brings us to the sound of Zuma.