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| Side one: |
Mint Minus Minus |
| Side two: |
Mint Minus Minus |
NOTE: There is a small mark on side one, track two, that makes five moderate pops at the start of the song.
On side two, one half inch into the first track there are five light ticks.
Side one starts out with Queen's back-to-back anthemic classics, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions". Does it get any better for a Queen fan? Hell no.
It is ridiculously tough to find decent sound for Queen. We've suffered through a lot of fruitless shootouts, but this album is clearly a cut above most of their recordings. On a copy like this, it's absolutely stunning!
Stomping and Clapping
The stomps and claps that introduce the former should make you feel like you are in a stadium full of people with a single goal - to rock you. Those stomps and claps need to have both weight and clarity, an unusual combination. One without the other is not going to cut it. The record needs to be able to reproduce the room everybody is in, while still conveying the tremendous impact and power. Most domestic pressings are severely lacking in these areas. The sound is frustrating -- you want to rock but the sound won't let you.
Another quality our best copies excelled in was the sound of Brian May's guitar during his solo toward the end of the song. Here his tone is very boxy with no real highs or lows, but when that sound is exaggerated by bad mastering, it sounds like there are mattresses sitting in front of his amplifiers. The best copies had extension on the high end, restoring the clarity and complimenting his distinctive technique.
Pay close attention to John Deacon's bass work underneath Freddie's singing. The notes he plays should be very distinguishable and have a full, round tone.
When the tension reaches its climax right before the epic chorus begins, Roger Taylor does a huge drum roll that should let you hear what his toms really sound like - serious attack, high-pitched, and roomy.
The Best Sound
Some of the best sound on this album can be found on the second half of the second side. We listened to "It's Late" on our shootout winner with dropped jaws. It sounds like a completely different album. It's got high-end extension that can even be heard on most of the bad copies. Can you imagine having to be the mastering engineer for this album? When you play a track like this and realize that the cutting equipment used to make the British pressings must have been great. The sound is awesome.
What outstanding 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 1977
Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments (and effects!) 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.
Size
One of the qualities that we don't talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record's presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.
Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.
And most of the time those very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy that does all that, it's an entirely different listening experience.
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.
