Santana
Abraxas

*NOTE: There is a mark that plays 20 times lightly at the start of track 1 on side 1, "Singing Winds, Crying Beasts." There is a slight warp that plays as a tick lightly and intermittently throughout all of side 2, most noticeable during the quieter parts. There is also a mark that plays 5 times lightly and intermittently at the start of track 1, "Se a Cabó," followed by a stitch that plays 5 times at a moderate level.

This vintage Columbia pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely 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 Abraxas 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 studio space

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.

Abraxas Rocks

This is one of those recordings that demands to be played loud. If you've got the the big room, big speakers, and plenty of power to drive them, you can have a live rock and roll concert in your very own house.

When Santana lets loose with some of those legendary monster power chords -- which incidentally do get good and loud in the mix, unlike most rock records which suffer from compression and "safe" mixes -- I like to say that there is no stereo system on the planet that can play loud enough for me. (Horns maybe, but I don't like the sound of horns, so there you go.)

You may have heard me say this before, but it's important to make something clear about this music. It doesn't even make sense at moderate listening levels. Normal listening levels suck the life right out of it. You can tell by the way it was recorded -- this music is designed to be played back at loud levels, and anything less does a disservice to the musicians, not to mention the listener, you.

What We're Listening For On Abraxas

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• 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, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also 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 instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Musicianship

Like Santana's first album, when you play a Hot Stamper copy of Abraxas very loud, you soon find yourself marveling at the musicianship of the group -- because the better Hot Stamper pressings, communicating every bit of the energy and clarity the recording has to offer, let you hear what a great band they were.

On badly mastered records, such as the run-of-the-mill domestic LP, or the audiophile pressings on MoFi and CBS, the music lacks the power of the real thing. I want to hear Santana rock. Most pressings don't let me do that, but the better ones sure do.

Folks, you owe it to yourself to hear what a great band Santana was back in the day. Hot Stampers of any of the first three records will do the trick. If you've got the stereo that can play live rock and roll, we've got the records that sound like Santana playing live.

Take it from someone who likes to listen to his music at fairly loud levels, it is truly a thrill.

Size

One of the qualities that we don't talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record's presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.

And most of the time those very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy that does all that, it's an entirely different listening experience.

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 other 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 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.

A Must Own Rock Record

We consider this album Santana's Masterpiece. It's a recording should be part of any serious rock collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Singing Winds, Crying Beasts
• Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen
• Oye Como Va
• Incident at Neshabur

Side Two

• Se a Cabó
• Mother's Daughter
• Samba Pa Ti
• Hope You're Feeling
• El Nicoya

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

The San Francisco Bay Area rock scene of the late '60s was one that encouraged radical experimentation and discouraged the type of mindless conformity that's often plagued corporate rock. When one considers just how different Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead sounded, it becomes obvious just how much it was encouraged.

In the mid-'90s, an album as eclectic as Abraxas would be considered a marketing exec's worst nightmare. But at the dawn of the 1970s, this unorthodox mix of rock, jazz, salsa, and blues proved quite successful.

Whether adding rock elements to salsa king Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va," embracing instrumental jazz-rock on "Incident at Neshabur" and "Samba Pa Ti," or tackling moody blues-rock on Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman," the band keeps things unpredictable yet cohesive.