Chuck Mangione
Feels So Good

*NOTE: There is a slight warp on both sides that is not audible in the least. If you're using a reasonably good arm and cartridge, you should have no problem tracking it perfectly. That said, if you have any issues, you can return it within 30 days for a full refund, and we will pay the domestic return shipping.

It's shocking just how lifeless and pointless Feels So Good can sound on some copies; after only a few minutes the band seems to be having a hard time staying awake. But the same performance is captured on every pressing, so how can the band sound so inspired here and so uninspired elsewhere?

It's one of the mysteries of recorded media, one which still takes us by surprise on a regular basis, week in and week out as a matter of fact.

The copies that are present, clear, open, transparent and energetic, with a solid rhythmic bass line driving the music, are a hundred times more enjoyable than many that can be found practically unplayed (gee, I wonder why?) sitting in most record lover's collections.

This idea that most pressings do a poor job of communicating the music still has not seeped into the consciousness of most audiophiles, but we're working on changing that, one Hot Stamper at a time.

By the way, if you know Feels So Good only through the radio, you may be surprised to find that it's close to ten minutes long, not the three minutes you're familiar with. The band stretches out quite a bit and the solos are fairly inventive, as AMG noted.

What The Best Sides Of Feels So Good 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.

Best Practices

Recently we did one of our regular shootouts for Feels So Good, using pressings we know from experience to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them as carefully as we always do. Then we unplugged everything in the house we could get away with, carefully warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next couple of hours playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the others do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given pressing reproduces those passages.

The process could not be more simple. The first step is to go deep into the sound. There you find something special, something you can't find on most copies. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

What We're Listening For On Feels So Good

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• 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, full-bodied 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 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

• Feels So Good
• Maui-Waui
• Theme From "Side Street"

Side Two

• Hide & Seek (Ready Or Not Here I Come)
• Last Dance
• The XIth Commandment

AMG 4 Star Review

Due to the title cut, this was a huge seller when it originally came out... this set from flügelhornist Chuck Mangione (which helped give guitarist Grant Geissman some fame) is actually stronger from the jazz standpoint than Mangione's subsequent dates. The leader has some good solos, as does Geissman and saxophonist Chris Vadala, and the quintet's ensembles are generally both sparse and attractive. Pity that in ways this was Chuck Mangione's last worthwhile release to date; success did stunt his artistic growth.