|
|
|
|
|
 |
Hot Stamper (Quiet Vinyl)The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts...
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Product DetailTrack ListingAMG ReviewShooting Out PepperOriginal Mono and Stereo
|
SONIC GRADE: (?) |
|
| Side one: |
 |
| Side two: |
|
VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?) |
|
| Side one: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
| Side two: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
A more original group of songs simply could not be found in 1967 (the world would have to wait until the White Album came out for an even more original batch), individually brilliant and unique. I never really appreciated this album back in the day, but repeated listenings has shown me the error of my ways. There's a reason it regularly gets voted the greatest rock album of all time.
Shootout Criteria (What To Listen For)
What are the sonic qualities by which a Pop or Rock record -- any Pop or Rock record -- should be judged? Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.
When we can get many of the qualities above to come together on the side we're playing we provisionally award it a Hot Stamper grade, which may or may not be revised over the course of the shootout as we hear what the various other copies sound like. Once we've been through all our side ones, we then play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner. Other copies have their grades raised or lowered depending on how they sounded relative to the shootout winner. Repeat the process for the other side and the shootout is officially over. All that's left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.
That's why the most common grade for a White Hot stamper pressing is Triple Plus (A+++) on one side and Double Plus (A++) on the other. Finding the two best sounding sides from a shootout on the same LP certainly does happen, but is sure doesn't happen as often as we would like (!) -- there are just too many variables in the mastering and pressing processes to insure consistent quality.
Record shootouts may not be rocket science, but they're a science of a kind, one with strict protocols developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can possibly make them.
The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing -- or your money back.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
With a Little Help from My Friends
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
Getting Better
Fixing a Hole
She’s Leaving Home
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Side Two
Within You, Without You
When I’m Sixty-Four
Lovely Rita
Good Morning, Good Morning
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
A Day in the Life
AMG Review
With Revolver, the Beatles made the Great Leap Forward, reaching a previously unheard-of level of sophistication and fearless experimentation. Sgt. Pepper, in many ways, refines that breakthrough, as the Beatles consciously synthesized such disparate influences as psychedelia, art-song, classical music, rock & roll, and music hall, often in the course of one song.
Not once does the diversity seem forced — the genius of the record is how the vaudevillian 'When I'm 64' seems like a logical extension of 'Within You Without You' and how it provides a gateway to the chiming guitars of 'Lovely Rita.'
It's possible to argue that there are better Beatles albums, yet no album is as historically important as this.
Recently we did one of our regular shootouts for Sgt. Pepper, using pressings we know from experience have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them as carefully as we always do, but this time we threw the new 180 gram pressing into our cleaning pile.
Then we unplugged everything in the house we could get away with, carefully warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next couple hours playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.
If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them against each other again and again the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.
The process is simple enough. First you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can't find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
At the end of the shootout we readjusted the VTA for the 180 gram pressing, again by ear, and listened to the passages we had just heard dozens of times. To see the results of our comparison, please click on our The Beatles Heavy Vinyl Sgt. Pepper’s review pictured to the left.
We had the opportunity not long ago to audition a very clean original early pressing of the album and were frankly quite taken aback by how just plain AWFUL it was in every respect. No top end above 8k or so, flabby bass, muddy mids -- this was as far from Hot Stamper sound as you could get.
To be fair, we have played exactly one copy on our current system. (Played an early copy or two long ago but on much different equipment, so any judgments we might have made are highly suspect.) Perhaps there are good ones. We have no way of knowing whether there are, and we are certainly not motivated to find out given the price that original Sgt. Pepper's are fetching these days.
We can tell you this much: no original British pressing of any Beatles album up through Pepper has ever impressed us sonically. We've played plenty and have yet to hear one that's not congested, crude, distorted, bandwidth-limited and full of tube smear. (The monos suffer from all of these problems and more of course, which is only natural; they're both made with the Old School cutting equipment of the day.)
If that's your sound more power to you. It's definitely not ours. The hotter the stamper, the less congested, crude, distorted, bandwidth-limited and smeary it will be.
Try the CD
If you happen to own an early pressing you like, you really owe it to yourself to hear just how good a Hot Stamper pressing can sound.
If you don't want to spend that kind of money, perhaps a listen to the new CD would be in order. I will go out on a limb and predict that the new CD is significantly better sounding in most ways than any original pressing you may own, and it's about $15.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
