White Hot Stamper

The Steve Miller Band
Brave New World

SONIC GRADE: (?)
Side one:
Side two:
VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?)
Side one:	Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus
Side two:	Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus

We just finished a big shootout for this fun Glyn Johns-engineered album, and one thing we can tell you without fear of contradiction is that the average copy of this album simply won't cut it for serious audiophile listening. This copy had some of the best sound we heard, with the kind of open, extended top end and big, solid bottom that really lets this music come to life!

If you're not familiar with this album, it is certainly not the Steve Miller Band sound that you'd expect after hearing Fly Like An Eagle and The Joker a million times on classic rock radio. This is the grungier psych-blues side of the band. one that most of us have probably long forgotten by now.

All Music Guide gives the album 4 1/2 stars, and we enjoyed it as well, so its sonic and musical credentials are certainly in order.

What amazing sides such as these 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 1969

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

What We Listen For on Brave New World

Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?

Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Glyn Johns in this case -- would have put them.

The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.

Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.

Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.

Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.

Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

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 other 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.