Queen
News of the World

Side one starts out with Queen’s back-to-back anthemic classics, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions." Does it get any better for a Queen fan? Hell no!

The stomps and claps that introduce the former should make you feel like you are in a stadium full of people with a single goal -- to rock you. Those stomps and claps need weight and clarity, an unusual combination. One without the other is not going to cut it.

The record needs to be able to reproduce the room everybody is in, while still conveying the tremendous impact and power. Most domestic pressings are severely lacking in these areas. This kind of anemia can be frustrating -- you want to rock but the sound won’t let you.

Another quality our better copies excelled in was the sound of Brian May’s guitar during his solo toward the end of the song. Here his tone is very boxy with no real highs or lows, but when that sound is exaggerated by bad mastering, it sounds like there are mattresses sitting in front of his amplifiers. The better copies had extension on the high end, restoring the clarity and complimenting his distinctive technique.

Pay close attention to John Deacon’s bass work underneath Freddie’s singing. The notes he plays should be very distinguishable and have a full, round tone.

When the tension reaches its climax right before the epic chorus begins, Roger Taylor does a huge drum roll that should let you hear what his toms really sound like – serious attack, high-pitched, and roomy.

Some of the best sound on this album can be found on the second half of the second side. We listened to "It’s Late" with dropped jaws. It’s like a completely different album! It’s got high-end extension that can even be heard on the bad copies! Can you imagine having to be the mastering engineer for this album? The problems seem far too varied and complex to be fixed in the mastering. Then you hear a track like this and realize that the cutting equipment they were using must have been great! The sound is awesome!

What The Best Sides Of News of the World 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 1977
• 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.

What We're Listening For On News of the World

• 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.

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

• We Will Rock You
• We Are the Champions
• Sheer Heart Attack
• All Dead, All Dead
• Spread Your Wings
• Fight From the Inside

Side Two

• Get Down, Make Love
• Sleeping on the Sidewalk
• Who Needs You
• It’s Late
• My Melancholy Blues

AMG Review

… many of these songs work well on their own as entities, so there is plenty to savor here, especially from Brian May. Whether he’s doing the strangely subdued eccentric English pop "All Dead, All Dead" or especially the majestic yet nimble rocker "It’s Late," he turns in work that gives this album some lightness, which it needs.

And that’s the reason News of the World was a monster hit despite its coldness — when it works, it’s massive, earth-shaking rock & roll, the sound of a band beginning to revel in its superstardom.