The Moody Blues
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

*NOTE: This record was not noisy enough to rate our M-- to EX++ grade, but it's not quite up to our standards for Mint Minus Minus either. If you're looking for quiet vinyl, this is probably not the best copy for you.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This copy had the big, rich, lush British sound that can only be heard on the better Moody Blues pressings.

Great-sounding Moody Blues albums don’t show up on our site too often -- they’re just not that easy to come by. Dull, veiled, boring sound is the rule, and big, rich, clear sound like this the exception.

This vintage Threshold 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 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour 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 1971
• 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.

Smokin’ Psychedelic Sound

The soundfield is big, wide, and deep -- exactly what you what for these big production songs with layers upon layers of musical ideas. When the various parts don’t have room to breathe, your copy is in trouble.

The bass is deep and punchy, the vocals are full-bodied and breathy, and the amount of ambience around the instruments is exquisite. You’re going to have a hard, painful time trying to find better sound for this album than you’ll hear on these two sides.

Three Qualities To Listen For

Achieving just the right balance of Tubey Magical, rich but not too rich “Moody Blues Sound” is no mean feat. You had better be using the real master tape for starters. Then you need a pressing with actual extension at the top, a quality rarely found on most imports. Finally, good bass definition is essential; it keeps the bottom end from blurring the midrange. No domestic copy in our experience has ever had these three qualities, and only the best of the imports manages to combine all three on the same LP.

Every Moody Blues record is going to sound a bit murky and muddy; that’s obviously the kind of sound that these guys were going for. On anything but a Hot Stamper pressing, the result is going to be a fat, turgid, thick sounding record that is impossible to penetrate. When you find one like this, you can begin to understand what the band was going for, and the best moments are pure Moody Blues magic.

No Sacrifice Necessary — You Can Have It All

With the better pressings, all the clarity and resolution comes without sacrificing the Tubey Magical richness, warmth and lushness for which the Moody Blues recordings are justifiably famous. I’m not kidding -- the better pressings present this music in a way that no previous LPs of it that we’ve ever played could. Some are so correct from top to bottom, so present and alive, while still retaining all the richness and sweetness we expect from British Moody Blues records, that I find it hard to believe you can do any better, in this life anyway. Some copies manage to take the Moodies’ wonderful music to another level. They are the very definition of a Hot Stamper.

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

• Procession
• The Story In Your Eyes
• Our Guessing Game
• Emily’s Song
• After You Came

Side Two

• One More Time To Live
• Nice To Be Here
• You Can Never Go Home
• My Song

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

The best-realized of their classic albums, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was also the last of the group’s albums for almost a decade to be done under reasonably happy and satisfying circumstances — for the last time with this lineup, they went into the studio with a reasonably full song bag and a lot of ambition and brought both as far as time would allow…

Sad to say, the group would never be this happy with an album again — at least not for a lot of years — or with their commitment to being a group, though they would leave one more highly worthwhile album before taking a hiatus for most of the rest of the 1970s.