Name: Band, The - Rock Of Ages - Super Hot Stamper
SKU: 584766

The performances are uniformly excellent, and the live five-piece horn section adds a lot to the fun and energy of the music. (The same can be said for Little Feat’s live album, Waiting for Columbus. We’ve been offering Hot Stampers on that album for years; it's the best way to hear the band at their best, outside the studio.)

There's real Tubey Magic on this album, along with breathy vocals, in-your-listening-room presence, and plenty of rock and roll energy.

All four sides here are just plain bigger, richer, clearer and smoother than most of the other copies we played. The energy level is off the charts. This is The Band playing live at the peak of their powers. Hearing this outstanding pressing should be unlike anything you have experienced before, unless you saw them back in the day, some fifty years ago, and how many of us can honestly say we did? ("Honestly" being the operative word there.)

It should go without saying that this is music that belongs in any popular music collection. My favorite song here is "I Don't Want To Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes." It's The Band at their best -- LIVE.

What The Best Sides Of Rock Of Ages 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
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 these records 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

Turn It Up

Most copies of this album do not have a boosted bottom or top, which means that at normal listening volumes -- depending on how you define that term -- they can sound pretty flat. This is one album that needs to be turned up, obviously not to the levels of a live rock concert, but up about until you can get the bass and the highs to come out. We found ourselves adding more and more level in order to get the sound to come to life, and it was playing pretty loud before the sound was right. But it's so good that way, why not crank it?

Only the copies have any hope of sounding right in our experience. They're the only ones that sound right at louder levels.

What We're Listening For On Rock Of Ages

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 vocals 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.

More of What to Listen For

The better copies are surprisingly transparent -- just listen to the "room" around the vocals. On most copies, there simply is no ambience around the vocals at all. The truly transparent copies are the only ones that can show you what's really on the master tape. They set a standard for the rest of the album in terms of midrange transparency and spatial resolution that will be hard to beat.

Next, listen to how deep and powerful the bass is on the various sides. I don't remember that any other copy had bass on any side like this one.

Common Problems

The most obvious problems with the sound of this album are ones common to many if not most rock records of the era: lack of presence, too much compression, opacity, smear (easily heard on the brass), blurry bass, lack of weight from the lower mids on down -- we hear lots of Classic Rock records with this litany of shortcomings.

But it's not the fault of the master tape; it's probably not even the fault of the mastering engineer most of the time. It's just plain bad pressing quality. The sound simply doesn't get stamped onto the vinyl right and the result is one or more of the problems above. And if you don't know how to clean your records properly, forget it, you have virtually no chance of hearing good sound on Rock of Ages.

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 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.