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SONIC GRADE: (?) |
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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 |
With the Count Basie Orchestra backing him on some tracks (Ev'rybody Has The Right To Be Wrong
on side one and Nice Work If You Can Get It and They Can't Take That Away From Me on side two just to mention a few we especially liked) the swinging Sinatra is heard in his prime and he sounds just great to us.
Without a Song has a killer big band arrangement and a stellar performance from Ol Blues Eyes himself.
The knock on this album is that with nine different arrangers and tracks recorded in different years, consistency is not its strong suit.
But is that really fair? Allmusic complained about the performances and arrangements but we certainly wouldn't call any track here second rate. Most of the album strikes us as Sinatra at his best, so we're a little dismayed by the critics' dismissal of the album. We loved it.
Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, Tubey Magical sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Frank Sinatra singing live in your listening room. The best copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of older recordings (this one is now 44 years old), I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but less than one out of 100 new records do, if our experience with the hundreds we've played can serve as a guide.
Sinatra's Standards
Sinatra set very high standards for his repertoire, his musicians, his arrangements and most of all, his performances. I find no evidence to support the contention that any of the above are lackluster or second-rate on My Kind of Broadway.
If you have any doubts, go to youtube, pull up the album and take a listen to some of the tracks. We can't find a bad one and we would be surprised if you could either. There are lots of great ones in fact.
What do the best Hot Stamper pressings of My Kind of Broadway give you?
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 would 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 most 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.
Vintage Reverb
If you don't like at least some reverb on your vocals, Sinatra's albums are probably not for you. The standard recording approach for Male Vocals in the '50s and '60s was to add reverb to them. Sometimes it sounds right and sometimes it's too much. For "too much" play some of Nat King Cole's records from the era to hear what I mean. (Try "Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer" from 1963 if you don't know where to start.)
Like any processing of the sound in the studio -- compression, limiting, reverb, EQ, etc. -- it can be used with taste and discretion and make the recording better, or it can be overdone and ruin everything. For our part we think Sinatra's recordings use reverb tastefully and correctly to enhance the sound.
And of course there sure aren't going to be any versions of this music coming along any time soon without the added echo. If anything, they add EVEN MORE reverb to the incredibly bad sounding Sinatra compact discs they've been reissuing for the last fifteen or twenty years, complete with noise-gating, compression and all the rest -- nice!
There is no way any Sinatra record ever sounded like one of these awful CDs, but that has not inhibited those in charge of issuing them.
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
