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VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?) |
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Mint Minus Minus |
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Mint Minus Minus |
These Nearly White Hot Stamper pressings have top quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers ("relative" being relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full refund, no questions asked.
This Capitol LP has the MIDRANGE MAGIC that’s missing from the later reissues. It gives you the sense that Frank Sinatra is right in front of you.
He's no longer a recording -- he's a living, breathing person. We call that "the breath of life," and this record has it in spades. His voice is rich, sweet, and free of any artificiality. You immediately find yourself lost in the music, because there's no "sound" to distract you.
This copy was simply fuller, richer, clearer, more tonally correct, more transparent, bigger, livelier and more involving than any other we played. It's the very definition of a Hot Stamper, and in this case, since it sounded just right and nothing could beat it.
We know a fair bit about the man's recordings at this point. As of today, we've done commentaries for 30 different Sinatra shootouts, and that's not even counting the other titles that either bombed or were sold off years ago.
There are some true Sinatra classics here including: Stormy Weather; I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You; Here's That Rainy Day; I Can't Get Started and I'll Never Smile Again.
Ralph J Gleason closes his notes with this parting thought:
If I had my way (and the Comstock Lode to pay the bill), I would have Frank Sinatra record every song I have ever liked. I wouldn’t care how he did it, with what accompaniment, with what interpolations or changes in tempo. I know I would like it. The fact that Capitol is gradually, through its series of Sinatra recordings, accomplishing this for me, I count as one of the greatest blessings of the decade.
What these amazing sides of No One Cares 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 1959
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, of course, the only way to hear all of the above.
Best Practices
If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.
The process is simple enough. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can't find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
What We're Listening For on Softly As I Leave You
Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
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 common to most LPs.
Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as 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 players.
Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren't "back there" somewhere, way behind the speakers. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus 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.
