The Association
Insight Out

*NOTE: Track 1 ("Never My Love") and track 2 ("Happiness Is") on side 2 of disc 2 play closer to Mint Minus Minus to EX++.

These vintage Warner Brothers Gold Label stereo pressings have the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records 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 Insight Out 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 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 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

Pop and Rock Shootouts

What are the sonic qualities by which a Pop or Rock record -- any Pop or Rock record -- should be judged?

Pretty much the ones we discuss in most of our Hot Stamper listings: energy, vocal presence, frequency extension (on both ends), transparency, spaciousness, harmonic textures (freedom from smear is key), rhythmic drive, tonal correctness, fullness, richness, three-dimensionality, and on and on down the list.

When we can get a number of these qualities to come together on the side we’re playing, we provisionally give it a ballpark Hot Stamper grade, a grade that is often revised during the shootout as we hear what the other copies are doing, both good and bad.

Once we’ve been through all the side ones, we play the best of the best against each other and arrive at a winner for that side. Other copies from earlier in the shootout will frequently have their grades raised or lowered based on how they sounded compared to the eventual shootout winner. If we’re not sure about any pressing, perhaps because we played it early on in the shootout before we had learned what to listen for, we take the time to play it again.

Repeat the process for side two and the shootout is officially over. All that’s left is to see how the sides of each pressing match up.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a science of a kind, one with strict protocols that we’ve developed over the course of many years to insure that the results we arrive at are as accurate as we can make them.

The result of all our work speaks for itself, on this very record in fact. We guarantee you have never heard this music sound better than it does on our Hot Stamper pressing -- or your money back.

What We're Listening For On Insight Out

• 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.

Our Famous 2-packs

Our 2-pack sets combine two copies of the same album, with at least a Super Hot Stamper sonic grade on the better of each "good" side, which simply means you have before you a pair of records that offers superb sound for the entire album.

Audiophiles are often surprised when they hear that an LP can sound amazing on one side and mediocre on the other, but since each side is pressed from different metalwork which has been aligned independently, and perhaps even cut by different mastering engineers from tapes of wildly differently quality, in our experience it happens all the time. In fact it's much more common for a record to earn different sonic grades for its two sides than it is to rate the same grade. That's just the way it goes in analog, where there's no way to know how a any given side of a record sounds until you play it, and, more importantly, in the world of sound everything is relative.

Since each of the copies in the 2-pack will have one good side and one noticeably weaker or at best more run-of-the-mill side, you'll be able to compare them on your own to hear just what it is that the Hot Stamper sides give you. This has the added benefit of helping you to improve your critical listening skills. We'll clearly mark which copy is Hot for each side, so if you don't want to bother with the other sides you certainly won't have to.

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.

Track Commentary

The Tracklist tab above will take you to a select song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What to Listen For advice.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found here.

A Must Own Pop Record

We consider this album a Masterpiece. It's a recording that should be part of any serious popular music collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Wasn't It a Bit Like Now (Parallel '23)
• On a Quiet Night

• This is an interesting track, one I never fully appreciated before. It sounds just like the Mamas and the Papas! Perhaps Bones Howe, the man who recorded both groups, had something to do with the crossover harmonies and similiar arrangements. Either way, it's one of the stronger songs on the album.

• We Love Us
• When Love Comes to Me
• Windy

• Windy never sounds quite as good as the other tracks; we suspect it may have an extra generation of tape. They might have added something after the final mix which resulted in another piece of tape between us and the music -- too bad because it's such a great song! Everything around it is more alive sounding, so what else could it be?

• Still, on the best copies you will hear sound far superior to what you remember hearing on the radio, that's for damn sure.

• Reputation

Side Two

• Never My Love

• This is actually the best sounding track on the album. Those of you with better front ends will be astonished at the quality of the sound found on the best copies. It is the very definition of Tubey Magic. If you have a skeptical neighbor or friend who doesn't know what this Old School Analog Foolishness is all about, sit him (or her) down and drop the needle on Never My Love.

• If the stereo is up to it, and you have the right copy of the record (this one will do nicely), you will be demonstrating the kind of magic no digital media in the history of the world will ever manage to reproduce.

• And you don't need tubes to do it. The Tubey Magic is on the tape, it's on the record (when you get a good one), so all you have to do it play it right.

Easier said than done but what in audio isn't?

• Happiness Is
• Sometime
• Wantin' Ain't Gettin'
• Requiem for the Masses

AMG Review

Insight Out is an enjoyable folk-rock album with a few digressions into garage punk, novelty tunes, and psychedelia, all displaying much of what the group did best. The harmonies and choruses are among the most beautifully textured singing in a rock outfit this side of the Beach Boys, while the playing is engaging.

Insight Out was done somewhat in the shadow of Harpers Bizarre's experimental "Feelin' Groovy" single -- the opening number, "Wasn't It a Bit Like Now," was an exercise in nostalgia similar to the later successful songs of Harpers Bizarre. "On a Quiet Night" and "We Love Us" are folk-rock ballads on which the group's harmonies are the highlight, while "When Love Comes to Me" is a breezy little mood piece that resembles a slightly more ornate cousin to Simon & Garfunkel's "Punky's Dilemma."

In that company, the number one single "Windy" (the presence of which helped drive up sales of this album) sounds almost heavy and hard-rocking. It and the accompanying single, "Never My Love" (which was later a hit for the 5th Dimension), are the strongest tracks here.