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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 Minus* |
*NOTE: A mark makes 7 light ticks at the end of track 1, Miss Shapiro.
The wind is at your back here because this is one seriously well-recorded album. If this copy doesn't wake up your stereo nothing will.
Like its brother, 801 Live, this album is an amazing sonic blockbuster, with sound that positively leaps out of the speakers. Why shouldn't it? It was engineered by the superbly talented Rhett Davies at Island, the genius behind Taking Tiger Mountain, the aforementioned 801 Live, Avalon, Dire Straits' first album and many many more.
If we could regularly find copies of this Audiophile Blockbuster (and frankly if more people appreciated the album) it would definitely go on our Top 100 Rock and Pop List. In fact, it would easily make the Top Twenty from that list, it's that good.
Looking for Tubey Magic? Rhett Davies is your man. Just think about the sound of the first Dire Straits album or Avalon. The best pressings of those albums -- those with truly Hot Stampers -- are swimming in it.
What the best sides of Diamond Head 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 pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1975
Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
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 qualities we discuss 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.
Big Speakers Wanted
This isn't known as an audiophile album but it should be -- the sound is GLORIOUS -- wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and as rich and dynamic as it gets. It's also a big speaker album. Play this one as loud as you can. (801 Live is exactly the same way and needs high volumes to come to life.)
A Personal Favorite
This album basically became the set list for 801 Live, the concert collaboration between Eno, Manzanera and their fellow travelers. That album is one of my all time favorites too, and a Must Own for anyone who likes British Art Rock from the '70s.
What both of these albums share is amazing guitar work. Manzanera was the guitarist for Roxy Music, and this album can be enjoyed simply as an exercise in hearing every possible kind of sound the guitar can make. It also helps to have Eno doing electronic treatments for the instrument and coming up with a whole new sound.
One listen to a song like Diamond Head is all it should take to make you a fan. If that song doesn't do it for you, the rest of the album won't either, but I can't imagine how that could be.
Check 'Em All Off
Looking at the Hot Stamper checklist below, it occurs to me that the best copies of this album excel in every area we mention. It's energetic, dynamic, the sound just jumps out of the speakers, there's tons of bass, it's smooth -- in short, it's doing it all!
One Final Note
Domestic pressings suck. German pressings too. Don't waste your money. We've never heard a good one. (And most of the British pressings you can find won't hold a candle to this one.)
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.
