The Beatles
1967-1970 (The Blue Album)

*NOTE: There is a visible mark that plays lightly and intermittently throughout nearly all of track 4 on side 3, "Get Back." This same mark continues to play lightly throughout the first 1/2 of track 5, "Don't Let Me Down."

This is a wonderful sounding German import 2-LP set. We are on record as finding the British pressings of 1967-1970 too bright; certainly most of them are anyway.

(The original domestic pressings, as anyone who has ever played one can attest, mastered at Sterling no less, are absolutely godawful.)

Like most compilations, some songs sound better than others, but "Don’t Let Me Down" and "Come Together" are two that really stand out here. For those of you out there who have never tried one of our Hot Stamper Beatles records, this may be the best sound you’ve ever heard from them. The CDs -- even the new ones -- sure don’t sound like this.

These vintage import pressings have 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, these are the records 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 Blue Album (1967-1970) 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 beginning in 1967
• 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.

What We're Listening For On Blue Album (1967-1970)

• 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.

Where Can I Find Your Mono Beatles Records?

We do not sell Beatles records in mono.

They spent time on the mono mixes because getting the levels right for all the elements in a recording is ten times harder than deciding whether an instrument or voice should be placed in the left, middle or right of the soundstage.

And they didn’t even do the stereo mixes right some of the time, in our opinion. But wall to wall beats all stacked up in the middle any day of the week.

If you like mono Beatles records you will have to do your own shootouts for them, because we have never heard a mono Beatles record sound good enough to compete with our Hot Stamper stereo pressings.

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 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.

Side One

• Strawberry Fields Forever
• Penny Lane
• Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• With A Little Help From My Friends
• Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
• A Day In The Life
• All You Need Is Love

Side Two

• I Am The Walrus
• Hello Goodbye
• The Fool On The Hill
• Magical Mystery Tour
• Lady Madonna
• Hey Jude
• Revolution

Side Three

• Back In The U.S.S.R.
• While My Guitar Gently Weeps
• Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
• Get Back
• Don't Let Me Down
• The Ballad Of John & Yoko
• Old Brown Shoe

Side Four

• Here Comes The Sun
• Come Together
• Something
• Octopus's Garden
• Let It Be
• Across The Universe
• The Long And Winding Road

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

Picking up where 1962-1966 left off, the double-album compilation 1967-1970, commonly called The Blue Album, covers the Beatles' later records, from Sgt. Pepper's through Let It Be. Like The Red Album, The Blue Album was released in the wake of a pair of widely advertised quadruple-LP bootlegs, Alpha Omega, Vols. 1-2: The Story of the Beatles, which had appeared early in 1973.

And like its companion volume, this set contains a mixture of hits, including singles like "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," and "Revolution" -- which had originally appeared only as 45s -- plus important album tracks like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "A Day in the Life," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and "Come Together," as well as orphaned tracks such as the single versions of "Let It Be" and "Get Back," which had never been on any LP before. The first two sides of the original double-LP edition carry listeners through the highlights of the psychedelic era, starting with "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" and up through "Magical Mystery Tour," before returning to rock & roll territory on "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," and "Revolution."

The second LP skims three of the more popular tracks off of the sprawling White Album (aka The Beatles) and moves into the late singles ("The Ballad of John and Yoko," "Old Brown Shoe," "Let It Be"), plus single and album highlights from Abbey Road and Let It Be. As a précis of the group's final 36 months, it's all mightily impressive, even if 1967-1970 misses several great songs. But like its predecessor, this set does capture the essence (if not the full range) of the Beatles' later recordings.