{"product_id":"davissomed_2604-1","title":"Davis, Miles - Someday My Prince Will Come (360) - Hot Stamper","description":"\u003cp\u003eHere is the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even 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 control room hearing the master tape being played back, or, better yet, the direct feed from the studio, this is the record for you. It's what Golden Age Jazz Recordings are known for -- \u003ci\u003ethis sound\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf 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 less than one out of 100 new records do, if our experience with the hundreds we've played can serve as a guide.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWonderful Music and Sound\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe other giant on this record is \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%22John-Coltrane%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJohn Coltrane\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e, who plays on two tracks. Coltrane fans will hear some prime blowing from the master here. His style is so recognizable that it's a bit of a shock when he plays because \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%22Hank-Mobley%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHank Mobley\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e is the saxophone player on the rest of the album and he sounds completely different. It's unusual to change sax players in the middle of an album, but it happened on this one for reasons that we don't need to go into here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat The Best Sides Of Someday My Prince Will Come Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe most Tubey Magic, without which you have \u003ci\u003ealmost\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=%221961%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1961\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNatural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments of the orchestra having the correct timbre\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTransparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNo doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the above\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eGetting The Horns Right\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTop end extension\u003c\/strong\u003e is critical to the sound of the best copies. Lots of old records (and new ones) have no real top end; consequently, the studio or stage will be missing much of its natural air and space, and instruments will lack the full complement of harmonic information.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn addition, when the top end is lacking, the upper midrange and high frequencies get jammed together -- the highs can't extend up and away from the upper mids. This causes a number of much-too-common problems that we hear in the upper midrange of many of the records we play: congestion, hardness, harshness, and squawk. (Painstaking Vertical Tracking Angle adjustment is absolutely critical if you want your records to play with the least amount of these problems, a subject we discuss in the Commentary section of the site at length.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTube smear\u003c\/strong\u003e is common to most pressings from the 50s and 60s. The copies that tend to do the best in a shootout will have little or none, yet are full-bodied, tubey and rich.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFull-bodied sound is especially critical to the horns; any blare, leanness or squawk ruins at least some of the fun, certainly at the louder levels the record should be playing at.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe frequency extremes (on the best copies) are not boosted in any way. When you play this record quietly, the bottom and top will disappear (due to the way the ear handles quieter sounds as described by the Fletcher-Munson curve).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMost records (like most audiophile stereos) are designed to sound correct at moderate levels. Not this album. It wants you to turn it up. Then, and only then, will everything sound completely right musically and tonally from top to bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat We're Listening For On Someday My Prince Will Come\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eEnergy\u003c\/strong\u003e for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThen: \u003cstrong\u003epresence and immediacy\u003c\/strong\u003e. The trumpet isn't \"back there\" somewhere, way behind the speakers. It's front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put it.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eThe Big Sound\u003c\/strong\u003e comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThen \u003cstrong\u003etransient information\u003c\/strong\u003e -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTight, full-bodied bass\u003c\/strong\u003e -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNext: \u003cstrong\u003etransparency\u003c\/strong\u003e -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eExtend the top and bottom\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003ci\u003evoila\u003c\/i\u003e, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eProduction and Engineering\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%22teo-macero%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTeo Macero\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e was the producer, Fred Plaut the engineer for these sessions that took place on various dates in March, 1961, in Columbia's glorious sounding 30th Street Studio. It's yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCBS 30th Street Studio\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCBS 30th Street Studio, also known as Columbia 30th Street Studio, and nicknamed \"The Church,\" was an American recording studio operated by Columbia Records from 1949 to 1981 located at 207 East 30th Street, between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan, New York City.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was considered by some in the music industry to be the best sounding room in its time and others consider it to have been the greatest recording studio in history. A large number of recordings were made there in all genres, including Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (1959), Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (Original Broadway Cast recording, 1957), Percy Faith's Theme from A Summer Place (1960), and Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eRecording Studio\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHaving been a church for many years, it had been abandoned and empty for sometime, and in 1949 it was transformed into a recording studio by Columbia Records.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"There was one big room, and no other place in which to record\", wrote John Marks in an article in Stereophile magazine in 2002.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe recording studio had 100 foot high ceilings, a 100 foot floorspace for the recording area, and the control room was on the second floor being only 8 by 14 feet. Later, the control room was moved down to the ground floor.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"It was huge and the room sound was incredible,\" recalls Jim Reeves, a sound technician who had worked in it. \"I was inspired,\" he continues \"by the fact that, aside from the artistry, how clean the audio system was.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eMusical Artists\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMany celebrated musical artists from all genres of music used the 30th Street Studio for some of their most famous recordings.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBach: The Goldberg Variations, the 1955 debut album of the Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould, was recorded in the 30th Street Studio. It was an interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the work launched Gould's career as a renowned international pianist, and became one of the most well-known piano recordings. On May 29, 1981, a second version of the Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould was recorded in this studio, and would be the last production by the famous studio.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJazz trumpeter Miles Davis recorded almost exclusively at the 30th Street Studio during his years under contract to Columbia, including his album Kind of Blue (1959). Other noteworthy jazz musicians having recorded in this place: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1964, Bob Dylan and record producer Tom Wilson were experimenting with their own fusion of rock and folk music. The first unsuccessful test involved overdubbing a \"Fats Domino early rock \u0026amp; roll thing\" over Dylan's earlier, recording of \"House of the Rising Sun,\" using non-electric instruments, according to Wilson. This took place in the Columbia 30th Street Studio in December 1964. It was quickly discarded, though Wilson would more famously use the same technique of overdubbing an electric backing track to an existing acoustic recording with Simon \u0026amp; Garfunkel's \"The Sound of Silence\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eVinyl Condition\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMint 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.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThose 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Davis, Miles","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51720565457192,"sku":"davissomed","price":149.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0257\/3415\/2295\/files\/davissomed_1912_4_1396040520_882c4887-1742-45d3-91e7-8bab8b0bf86f.jpg?v=1715351004","url":"https:\/\/better-records.com\/products\/davissomed_2604-1","provider":"Better Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}