{"product_id":"fleetmyste_2610-3","title":"Fleetwood Mac - Mystery to Me - Super Hot Stamper","description":"\u003cp\u003eVintage 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMystery To Me is my All Time Favorite Fleetwood Mac album, and this copy has the sound that I always \u003cu\u003edreamed\u003c\/u\u003e this album could have, but didn’t -- until now. This is just the third Hot Stamper shootout that we’ve been able to do, since clean copies with the right stampers are ridiculously hard to come by. I’m not kidding. We must have spent the last ten years and more trying to find the right stampers for this record. I can tell you we were dead wrong so many times in the past that we had almost given up. Time and time again, just when I thought we had it figured out, we would go back and play our so-called \"hot\" copy, to find ourselves miserably disappointed all over again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHalf the copies you find of this record are mud and the other half have no bass. If my math is correct, that leaves zero copies that aren’t muddy and actually have bass. That comports rather well with what I was finding: under test conditions zero of the copies we played sounded any good. We were sorely vexed. Sorely, sorely vexed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen the skies opened up and the sun began to shine.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eGetting To This\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe new cleaning rituals cleared up enough of the mud to allow us to hear which stampers had promise, and the better equipment and room changes brought those hotter stampers to life, showing us which copies were worthy of the throne and which were merely pretenders.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe best copies get rid of that ridiculously smeared veiled quality that practically every copy you find suffers from. Clear and present mids and highs are essential to any copy worth playing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eAn Amazing Bass Drum Awaits You\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs I said above, that’s half the battle, and the other half is the bottom half of the spectrum, BASS and \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%22WHOMP%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWHOMP\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e. There is an amazing bass drum on this album that plays on selective tracks, most notably the song \"Why,\" and it will shake the foundation and knock your knick-knacks right off their shelves if you’ve got the woofers (and the room) to play it right. (I was using this record to demo my system in the mid-70s. I had a pair of Fulton Js and they could really pump out the low end this record needs.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat bass drum tells you a lot about your deep bass reproduction, but we prize a little something called whomp here at Better Records every bit as much. It’s the \u003ci\u003eweight\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003epower\u003c\/i\u003e you sense happening down below that translates into whomp factor. (This is the frequency area that screens and small dynamic drivers have the most trouble with. You need to be able to move lots of air under, say, 200 cycles to give the music a sense of real power down below. Few systems I’ve run into over the last thirty years can really pull it off.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat The Best Sides Of Mystery to Me 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=tag:%221973%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1973\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 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\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. \u003ci\u003ePlaying the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above,\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e\"Why\"\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSpeaking of the song \"Why,\" I have to confess that it’s my favorite Fleetwood Mac song of all time. Considering how many great songs this band has recorded over the decades, that’s really saying something. (\"Need Your Love So Bad\" off Pious Bird is right up there with it.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBob Weston, I learned today, did the arrangement. (I found his bio and copied it in the \u003cstrong\u003eReview\u003c\/strong\u003e section. Check it out; what a great story!) His guitar work throughout the album, along with the wonderfully complex arrangements for the songs, make this music a powerful and engaging listening experience 50+ years on.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis Hot Stamper pressing is the one that lets you hear it the way it was meant to be heard. Mid-fi quality systems are going to struggle with this one, but top quality systems are going to make this album a joy to hear, with breathy vocals, textured string arrangements, and the kind of rich, warm sound that is the hallmark of \u003cu\u003eanalog\u003c\/u\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat We're Listening For On Mystery to Me\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 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.\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 punchy 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\u003eOne Last Thing\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI’ve only heard two British copies of MTM, and one Japanese pressing in my entire life, but all three were dreadful sounding. Stick with the domestic pressings on this one. And if you’ve got ten years to spend searching in the wilderness, you too may find a Hot Stamper like this one!\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":"Fleetwood Mac","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68031038554408,"sku":"fleetmyste","price":299.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0257\/3415\/2295\/files\/fleetmystery.jpg?v=1792171836","url":"https:\/\/better-records.com\/products\/fleetmyste_2610-3","provider":"Better Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}