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. Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing - an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.Next: transparency - the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.Tight punchy bass - which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.Then transient information - fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.The Big Sound comes next - wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. What could be more important than the life of the music? What We’re Listening For On Hasten Down The Wind We do, and it’s records like this that make the effort and expense of building a full-range dynamic system so rewarding. This is truly a KNOCKOUT disc if you have the equipment for it. If you have a Big System that really rocks you owe it to yourself to get to know his work. This is a shame the guy makes Demo Disc Quality Pop Records about as good as those kinds of records can be made. Garay gets anything like his due with audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them. (To be clear, only the best copies share it. They all share his trademark super-punchy, jump-out-the-speakers, rich and smooth ANALOG sound. Garay is the man behind so many of our favorite recordings: James Taylor’s JT (a Top 100 title), Simple Dreams (also a Top 100 title), Andrew Gold, Prisoner In Disguise, etc. Kudos once again must go to Val Garay, the co-engineer here with Dave Hassinger (who owns The Sound Factory where the album was recorded). 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. No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space.Natural tonality in the midrange - with all the instruments having the correct timbre.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |