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SONIC GRADE: (?) |
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| Side one: |
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| Side two: |
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VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?) |
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| Side one: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
| Side two: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
Cream were certainly no slouches in the musicianship department, and this live performance captures them at the peak of their powers!
When you get a good copy of this album you're sure to hear what we heard -- that this is truly one of the great live rock albums (with a bit of studio material on side two as well). This has the Big Rock Sound that we go crazy for at Better Records. The best pressings, the ones that are full-bodied and smooth, let you crank the levels and reproduce the album good and loud the way it was meant to be heard.
When it's all working, you're front and center for a fiery Cream concert with these guys delivering one heckuva performance. And where else are you gonna get that these days?
Over the last twelve years that we've been doing our Hot Stamper thing we've heard scores of Cream albums; we know their music well, and they are hard to beat when playing live.
Heavy Cream
What the best sides of this Live Classic Rock Album have to offer is not hard to hear:
The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl domestic pressings like this one offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
Natural tonality in the midrange -- with the guitars and drums having the correct sound for this kind of recording
Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the concert hall
No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now
Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
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 of these wonderful originals.
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.
Bill Halverson
It's clear to us now that this is one of BILL HALVERSON's Engineering Masterpieces, right up there with Deja Vu and Steve Stills' first album (now that's a trio!).
