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. Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing - an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.Next: transparency - the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.Tight punchy bass - which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.Then transient information - fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.

The Big Sound comes next - wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.

They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them. The vocals aren't 'back there' somewhere, lost in the mix. What could be more important than the life of the music? 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. No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now.

Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space.

Natural tonality in the midrange - with all the instruments having the correct timbre.

Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low.

Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1981

The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing.

The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space.

What The Best Sides Of Freeze-Frame Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear 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.

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. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for - this sound. 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.

Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. This vintage EMI pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce.

The j. geils band freeze frame vinyl