White Hot Stamper

Cat Stevens
Tea for the Tillerman

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

This is one of the few White Hot copies to have been put up on the site over the years. It takes many, many -- way too many -- copies to find one that sounds like this. When it does, you know it. It ain't rocket science. This copy is ALIVE with musical energy.

Hearing this Hot Stamper is a PRIVILEGE that affords the listener insight into Cat Stevens' music that is simply not possible any other way. The emotional power of these songs is communicated so completely through our better copies that we can assure you the experience will be like playing the album for the first time.

This is, I hope it goes without saying, one of the greatest Folk Rock records of all time, the kind of music that belongs in any collection. I've been playing this album for 40 years and I can honestly say I've never once tired of hearing it. I do get tired of hearing bad copies.

Cat’s mixes are full of subtle elements that may require many listening sessions over the course of years, even decades, to recognize and appreciate. Consider them an extra reward for having played the record so many times. I've played hundreds of copies over the last thirty plus years and never tired of it once. As every music lover knows, the best albums only get better with time.

Tubey Magic Is Key

This vintage pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, 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 maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What the best sides of Tea For Tillerman 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 1970

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 space of the studio

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.

Problems to Watch For

Some of the more common problems we ran into during our shootouts were slightly veiled, slightly smeary sound, with not all the top end extension that the best copies have.

You can easily hear that smear on the guitar transients; usually they're a tad blunted and the guitar harmonics don't ring the way they should.

These problems are just as common to the Pink and Sunray Label UK Island pressings as they are to the Brown Label A&M domestic pressings. Smeary, veiled, top end-challenged pressings were regularly produced on both sides of the pond.

What We're Listening For on Tea For Tillerman

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 for the guitars and drums, 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 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.