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Mint Minus Minus* |
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Mint Minus Minus |
*A mark makes 1 loud and 3 medium pops during track 3, Starship Trooper
At its best, this album is a Big Speaker Prog-Rock Tour de Force with tremendous power and dynamic range, but it takes a special pressing like this one to bring it to life.
These guys -- and by that I mean this particular iteration of the band, the actual players that were involved in the making of this album -- came together for the first time and created the sound of Yes on this very album, rather aptly titled when you think about it.
With the amazing EDDIE OFFORD at the board, as well as the best batch of songs ever to appear on a single Yes album, they produced both their sonic and musical masterpiece -- good news for audiophiles with Big Speakers!
Drop the needle on this bad boy and you will find yourself on a Yes journey the likes of which you have never known. And that's what I'm in this audiophile game for. The Heavy Vinyl crowd can have their dead-as-a-doornail, wake-me-when-it's-over pressings that play quietly. I couldn't sit through one with a gun to my head.
What amazing 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 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 (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, of course, the only way to hear all of the above
This Copy Prog Rocks
Both sides have MASTER TAPE SOUND or something close to it! They're rich and full-bodied with lots of punch and plenty of WHOMP. The guitars are Tubey Magical with a fluid sound that takes the brilliant solos of Mr Steve Howe to a whole new level.
The transparency is also mindblowing -- you can easily pick out each multi-tracked voice and follow it throughout the course of a song.
The cymbal crashes are BIG and POWERFUL with correct extension. The tonality on both sides is Right On The Money.
The organ and synths sound amazingly real. Starship Troopers will blow your mind on this copy!
The Yes Album - What to Listen For
Here are the main qualities we listen for when we shootout Yes records:
1. Dynamics - The best copies have amazing dynamics. Some parts of this album should be STARTLING in their power. There is a fair amount of compression on this recording in places, don't get me wrong, but on the right copies, many passages of this music will have tremendous life and energy.
2. Smoothness - This album can be very harsh and unpleasant if the upper midrange is boosted at all, or lacks a full lower midrange to balance it out. The last thing in the world you want is a bright, harsh Yes record.
3. Bass - Bass definition and weight are CRUCIAL to the sound of this record. The thin-sounding copies rob this music of much of its POWER and are downgraded severely for it.
The Seventies - What a Decade!
Acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. The harmonic coherency, the richness, the body and the phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum.
This is some of the best High-Production-Value rock music of the '60s and '70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd, and far too many others to list. It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.
Big Production Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn't get much better than The Yes Album.
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.
