The Who
Quadrophenia

These Nearly White Hot Stamper pressings have top-quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers ("relative" meaning relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full refund, no questions asked.

On the best copies, the energy factor is off the charts. The highs are silky sweet, the bottom end is meaty, the drums are punchy and the vocals are present and tonally correct. The piano has real weight, the synths float breathily in the air, and there’s wonderful three-dimensional depth to the soundfield.

There’s a power to the sound that the average copy only hints at. The crashing guitar chords that are the hallmark of The Who often lack the weight of the real thing; they don’t punch you in the gut the way Townsend no doubt wanted them to.

Moon’s drums need to blast away like cannon fire. This is the quintessential Who sound. Everybody who’s ever seen them live knows it. I saw them back in the day when Moon was still behind his kit and it’s a sound I’ll never forget.

Most copies don’t have nearly this much Tubey Magic -- you aren’t going to believe all the richness, sweetness, and warmth here. The clarity and transparency are superb in their own right, and the impressive dynamic range really allows this copy to communicate the explosive energy of The Who at their peak.

As with any Who album, this is obviously not your typical audiophile Demo Disc. We don’t imagine you’ll be enjoying this one with wine, cigars, and polite conversation. This one is for turning up loud and rockin’ out -- in other words, it’s our kind of record!

What The Best Sides Of Quadrophenia 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 1973
• 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.

Ron Nevison

This very album was one of Ron Nevison’s first big engineering jobs. (They passed on Glyn Johns, if you can imagine that.) He went on to do Bad Company’s debut, a Top 100 album for us, as well as Straight Shooter, which in some ways I like even better as a recording, and then the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffitti.

He went on to do lots of the biggest-selling monster rock albums of the 80s, but the "80s sound" has never held much appeal for us, which is of course why you find so few recordings from that era on our site, silk purses, sow’s ears and all that.

What We're Listening For On Quadrophenia

• 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.

Wonderful Music

As with pretty much any double album there’s a bit of filler here and there, but we were once again impressed with this one’s consistency. This album has to rank right up there with the best rock albums of the 70s, right behind Who’s Next and probably on a par with Tommy, good company indeed. Side one is particularly strong, rocking incredibly hard from start to finish.

Quadrophenia is the last of the truly classic Who albums that started with Tommy, continued with Live at Leeds, hit the zenith of the band with Who’s Next, and came to an end with Quadrophenia. (Who Are You and The Who By Numbers may be very good albums, but even as good as they are neither one really fits into the Classic category.)

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 Who Album

We consider this concept album a near-Masterpiece, right behind Tommy and Who's Next. It's a recording that belongs in any serious rock music collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• I Am The Sea
• The Real Me
• Quadrophenia
• Cut My Hair
• The Punk And The Godfather

Side Two

• I’m One
• The Dirty Jobs
• Helpless Dancer
• Is It In My Head
• I’ve Had Enough

Side Three

• 5:15
• Sea And Sand
• Drowned
• Bell Boy

Side Four

• Doctor Jimmy
• The Rock
• Love, Reign O’er Me

AMG 5 Star Rave Review

Pete Townshend revisited the rock opera concept with another double-album opus, this time built around the story of a young mod's struggle to come of age in the mid-60s. If anything, this was a more ambitious project than Tommy, given added weight by the fact that the Who weren't devising some fantasy but were re-examining the roots of their own birth in mod culture.

In the end, there may have been too much weight, as Townshend tried to combine the story of a mixed-up mod named Jimmy with the examination of a four-way split personality (hence the title Quadrophenia), in turn meant to reflect the four conflicting personas at work within the Who itself.

The concept might have ultimately been too obscure and confusing for a mass audience. But there's plenty of great music anyway, especially on "The Real Me," "The Punk Meets the Godfather," "I'm One," "Bell Boy," and "Love, Reign o'er Me."

Some of Townshend's most direct, heartfelt writing is contained here, and production-wise it's a tour de force, with some of the most imaginative use of synthesizers on a rock record. Various members of the band griped endlessly about flaws in the mix, but really these will bug very few listeners, who in general will find this to be one of the Who's most powerful statements.