Is Year of the Cat on Mobile Fidelity a Record with Audiophile Appeal?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music Al Stewart Available Now

Our answer, judging by the copy we played not long ago, would be in the negative.

This is what a top copy of the album sounds like, based on our most recent shootout:

Incredible sound throughout this vintage Janus pressing of Stewart’s 1976 Masterpiece. With engineering by Alan Parsons, the top pressings are every bit the audiophile Demo Discs you remember. The best sides have sweet vocals, huge amounts of space, breathtaking transparency, and so much more.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

But if you own the wrong Mobile Fidelity pressing — there may be some that sound better than this one — you would never know how good sounding the album can be. We put one in a shootout recently and the results were pretty painful.

As the notes make clear, the Mobile Fidelity pressing with the stampers you see on the sheet above is:

  • So small, veiled and thick,
  • Yet the voice is overtextured (full of phony detail) and spitty (of course; Half-Speeds tend to be sibilant and some are ridiculously so).
  • The middle (snare and vocal) are always boxy, forward and weird, with way too much 300-400 hz
  • Wooly bass too, of course (again, this is something one hears on virtually every Half-Speed ever made).
  • Grade: no on both sides

Does that sound like an audiophile record to you?

It sure does to us! We’ve played plenty that sounded as bad this, and some that are even worse, if you can imagine such a thing.

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Charlie Mingus Asks the Question of the Day for Audiophiles – Compared to What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

We used to think the early Limelight pressing shown here was so amazing sounding that finding better sound for this recording would simply be impossible, but the original Mercury showed us just how wrong we were – the right Mercury pressing takes the recording to another level, one we never imagined it could reach. (In our experience records do that from time to time. We’ve written about some of the ones we’ve played here.)

Here is a small excerpt from our most recent commentary for the album:

The best copies recreate a live studio space the size of which you will not believe (assuming your room can do a good job of recreating their room). (Here are some of the other recordings we’ve auditioned with exceptional amounts of size and space.

The sound is tonally correct, Tubey Magical and above all natural. The timbre of each and every instrument is right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it — so high-resolution too.

If you love ’50s and ’60s large group jazz you cannot go wrong here. Mingus was a genius and the original music on this record is just one more album supporting the undeniability of that fact.

More evidence, if any were needed, that the three most important words in the world of audio are compared to what?

No matter how good a particular copy of a record may sound to you, when you clean and play enough of them you will almost always find one that’s better, and often surprisingly better.

You must keep testing all the reissues you can find, and you must keep testing all the originals you can find.

Shootouts are the only way to find these kinds of very special records. That’s why you must do them.

Nothing else works. If you’re not doing shootouts (or buying the winners of shootouts from us), you simply don’t have top quality copies in your collection, except in the rare instances where you just got lucky. In the world of records luck can only take you so far. The rest of the journey requires effort.

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Muddy Waters – Hard Again

More of the Music of Muddy Waters

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from start to finish, this vintage Blue Sky pressing (one of only a handful of copies to hit the site in four years) will be very hard to beat – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides are big, lively and jumpin’ out of the speakers – just right for this down and dirty music
  • A Grammy Winner, an AllMusic Five Star album – simply a superb recording and one of our favorites for 70s blues
  • 5 stars: “Christgau attributed the record’s intense quality to ‘the natural enthusiasm of an inspired collaboration,’ and remarked on its standing in Chicago blues, ‘except maybe for B.B. King’s Live at the Regal and Otis Spann’s Walking the Blues… I can’t recall a better blues album than this.'”

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Peter Gabriel Names a Third Record After Himself

More of the Music of Peter Gabriel

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it on both sides of this vintage UK copy – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Finding clean, quiet, early pressings of this album has been especially difficult for some time now and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier
  • A Must Own for Gabriel fans, this album is widely considered his breakthrough work as a solo artist
  • Listen closely and you’ll recognize Phil Collins’ now-signature (but at the time revolutionary) drum sound on several of the tracks, including “Intruder,” one of the best tracks on the album
  • 5 stars: “Generally regarded as Peter Gabriel’s finest record, his third eponymous album finds him coming into his own, crafting an album that’s artier, stronger, more song oriented than before.”
  • If you’re a fan, this is a Peter Gabriel classic from 1980 that belongs in your collection.

With this, his third release, Gabriel established himself as a true force in the rock world. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “I feel (and tremble) as if I am sitting in the Abbey Road Studios while they are recording.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Our good customer Alex had this to say about a White Hot Stamper pressing of Sgt. Peppers he purchased from us a while ago:

Hey Tom,   

I was very excited to have purchased a Triple/Triple Sgt. Pepper. So much so that I went out and bought a new stereo system. My copy arrived in January. There was no way I was going to take a chance and play it on my 30+ year-old vintage set-up. I have a friend who sells wicked awesome gear and I spent about a month from middle January to Middle February listening to quite a few turntables and speakers.

Once I settled on the system I then made an appointment to listen to Pepper. My wife and I went over to hear this White Hot Stamper.
The results? Tears of profound JOY.

And a big you-know-what eating grin on my face for the last week (and probably for the rest of my life). I was 9 years old in 1967 and I had only heard this LP on a cheap record player for years and I still loved it. It has been my most loved music for my entire life.

This copy is absolute, mind-blowing PERFECTION! The Fabs are at their BEST and I feel (and tremble) as if I am sitting in the Abbey Road Studios while they are recording.

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Miles Davis / In Person – Friday and Saturday Nights

More  of the Music of Miles Davis

  • This 2-LP 6-Eye Stereo pressing boasts very good Hot Stamper sound or BETTER from start to finish
  • We guarantee there is more space, richness, presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard or you get your money back – it’s as simple as that
  • Skip the Red Label pressings – the ones we’ve played were too thin and dry, which is sadly a sound far too common on Columbia reissues from the 70s
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Though short-lived, the unique character of this group was its sheer intensity and diversity of attack. Because of the departure of Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, Davis had to rely as much on a muscular attack in playing his instrument as his considerable gift for melodic improvisation. For his part, Mobley had the shoes of two monster players to fill, and he does so elegantly with a ton of fire in his playing. But it is Kelly and Chambers who really set the pace for this band.”
  • If you’re a jazz fan, this classic title from 1961 belongs in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1961 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

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George Harrison – All Things Must Pass

More of the Music of The Beatles

  • This early British box set of All Things Must Pass with the reissued (but still original looking) box boasts stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades or close to them on all SIX sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • If you’ve struggled with domestic pressings and later imports or Heavy Vinyl reissues, your troubles are over – here is the sound you were looking for
  • This is a tough record to play, but if you devoted plenty of time and money into your system, and you have big dynamic speakers and the power to drive them to fairly loud levels, you are really in for a treat with this set
  • 5 stars: “Without a doubt, Harrison’s first solo recording is his best. Drawing on his backlog of unused compositions from the late Beatles era, Harrison crafted material that managed the rare feat of conveying spiritual mysticism without sacrificing his gifts for melody and grand, sweeping arrangements.”
  • This is clearly George Harrison’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist can be found here.
  • This is a Must Own title from 1970, an exceptionally good year for rock and pop music
  • Ken Scott used a great deal of tube compression in the mixing and mastering of the album, which of course makes the sound exceptionally Tubey Magical. No modern reissue we’ve ever played has been able to capture that sound
  • The flip side is that it is also one of the most difficult to reproduce, requiring the highest quality, most transparent, least distorted, most highly-tweaked equipment in order to cut through the layers and layers of sound

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The Only Approach to Audio that Works

“Doing” Audio Is the Only Workable Approach to Better Sound

Best-selling author Nassim Taleb (“The Black Swan,” among many others) on why earned knowledge and immersing oneself in the smallest details of any subject lead to success:

“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning…”

This idea ties in to a great many commentaries we’ve written on this blog, more about records than the pursuit of higher quality audio in the home. We are, after all, in the record business, not the audio business.

This commentary describing how big questions rarely have good answers gets to the heart of why predicting which record pressings should be the best is a fool’s errand. An excerpt:

We’re really not that interested in big questions, mostly because there aren’t any big answers for them.

When it comes to records, being able to reveal deep underlying truths about a wide range of vinyl pressings is simply not possible. To be honest, we don’t think it can be done.

It’s not that we don’t have plenty of working knowledge. It’s that we have so much of it that we needed a blog to hold it all so that we could share it with others.

No, our working knowledge is made up of lots of little bits of data that guide us in discovering the best sounding pressings for the individual titles we choose to play.

It would be nice to have general rules to help us in our search for better sound on vinyl, but our experience tells us that general rules are so unreliable that they fail to function as rules at all.

And the same thinking applies to audio equipment, room treatments, turntable setup and everything else having to do with reproducing music in the home. We made the point years ago that tuning and tweaking — in other words, getting your hands dirty — is one of the best ways to improve your listening skills, which can’t help but lead to improvements in your ability to reproduce your favorite recordings. An excerpt:

Since we play all kinds of records all day, practically every day, as part of our regular shootout regimen, tweaking and tuning are much easier for us to do than they would be for most audiophiles. As I have told many in this hobby over the years, if you don’t do the work, the only person who doesn’t get to hear better sound is you. I can come home to my good sounding stereo — I’ve put in the work — but you’re stuck listening to all the problems you haven’t solved, right?

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Don’t Blame Bill Szymczyk If Your Copy of The Long Run Doesn’t Sound Good

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Eagles Available Now

Most copies have a smeary, veiled, stuck-in-the-speaker quality that makes for some painful listening on the tracks that are worth playing on The Long Run, which, depending on your taste and how much you like The Eagles, might work out to roughly half of them for most people who own the album, I’m guessing. We think the first two tracks on either side are hard to fault.

We should know; we’ve played them by the score. Some of their more notable faults in addition to those mentioned above:

  • Cardboard drums.
  • Non-existent ambience.
  • No energy.

Unless you get one of the hard, edgy, thin ones. Hard to say which would be more unpleasant to play.

The best copies are a whole different story, with the kind of big, punchy, full-bodied sound one hears on good copies of Hotel California.

What’s Bill Szymczyk’s problem anyway, you might ask. Can’t the guy record an album any better than this after being in the studio for all these years?

Yes he can. Don’t make the mistake of judging The Long Run by the typical bad pressing of it, the kind that Elektra was churning out by the millions back in the day.

Believe me, the master tape must be awesome if the sound of some of the records we played is any indication (which of course it is).

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Iggy Pop – The Idiot

More Rock and Pop

  • Iggy’s 1977 release is brought to life on this vintage RCA pressing with stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound from start to finish – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • These sides had the most energy, the punchiest bass, and the biggest, most immediate, most powerful presentation of practically any copy in our recent shootout
  • It’s the rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on any track and you’ll see what we mean
  • “[David] Bowie co-wrote a batch of new songs with Iggy, put together a band, and produced The Idiot, which took Iggy in a new direction decidedly different from the guitar-fueled proto-punk of the Stooges.”
  • 5 stars: “[The album] introduced the world to a very different Iggy Pop, and if the results surprised anyone expecting a replay of the assault of Raw Power, it also made it clear that Iggy was older, wiser, and still had plenty to say; it’s a flawed but powerful and emotionally absorbing work.”

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