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SONIC GRADE: (?) |
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| Side one: |
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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 to Mint Minus Minus |
| Side three: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
| Side four: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
This is an outstandingly well-recorded album, with huge amounts of open studio space and that Tubey Magical, rich, fat, dense British Rock Sound. That sound isn't easy to reproduce, but this copy absolutely nails it. Nothing else in our shootout came close to it!
If you have big speakers and the room to play them, this is quite the sonic tour de force. Credit Hugh Padgham, producer and engineer, who's worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Genesis, The Police, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Those bands make the kind of music that make good use of Padgham trademark sound: wall-to-wall, deep, layered, smooth, rich and stuffed to the gills. XTC with Padgham's help have here produced a real steamroller of an album in English Settlement.
The big hit on this album is one that most audiophiles will probably know: Senses Working Overtime. Even over the radio you can hear how dense the production is. Imagine what it sounds like on an original British pressing with Hot Stampers, played on a modern audiophile rig. Simply put, IT ROCKS.
What the best sides of English Settlement 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 1981
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.
We're Big Fans
If you love Big Production Rock, exemplified by the work of Ambrosia, Yes, Supertramp, ELP, Jethro Tull and others too numerous to name, this album should be quite an experience. Over the course of a long day -- four sides for each of about ten copies is a big job, trust me -- we grew to really like this band. Their music is sophisticated and innovative, with attention to detail second to none. Add top quality musicianship -- the drummer was a real standout on practically every side -- and you have an album that will reward repeated listenings for many years to come. And really put your system to the test to boot.
What We're Listening For on English Settlement
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, horns 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.
For Big Production Rock Albums such as this there are some obvious problem areas that are often heard on at least one or two sides of practically any copy of this four sided album.
With so many heavily-produced instruments crammed into the soundfield, if the overall sound is at all veiled, recessed or smeared -- problems common to 90+% of the records we play in our shootouts -- the mix quickly becomes opaque, forcing the listener to work too hard to separate out the elements of interest. Exhaustion, especially on this album, soon follows.
Transparency, clarity and presence are key. Note that none of the British copies we played was thin and anemic. (The domestic copies are made from dubs and can't begin to compete.) Almost all had plenty of tubey magic and bottom end, so thankfully that was almost never a problem. They did however tend to lack top end extension and transparency, and many were overly compressed. The sides that had sound that jumped out of the speakers, with driving rhythmic energy, worked the best for us. They really brought this complex music to life and allowed us to make sense of it. This is yet another definition of a Hot Stamper -- it's the copy that lets the music work as music.
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 that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.
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.
