What do such high grades give you for this album? Tubey Magical guitars, huge whomp factor on the bottom end, incredible dynamics and life, shocking transparency and clarity, and the kind of immediacy that puts these crazy southern rockers right in your very own living room.

This and Live At Fillmore East are the two most monumental albums these guys ever put out, and they have a lot in common. You know what you're gonna get with the Allmans: dueling electric guitars, sweet acoustic guitars, energetic drumming, and full-bodied vocals throughout.

There's obviously a lot of exploration -- two complete sides are dedicated to the song "Mountain Jam" -- but the heartfelt radio-friendly songs such as "Melissa" and "Little Martha" keep up the energy and provide maximum enjoyment factor.

What The Best Sides Of Eat A Peach 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
• 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 space of the studio or venue

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing these records 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 pressings that sound as good as these two do.

The Three Keys: Transparency, Energy, and WHOMP

A superb copy like this one really lets everything that's great about this music come through. You can easily pick out each of the musicians and follow their contributions over the course of the songs. The huge factor throughout kicks up the excitement factor and sets the foundation for the extended guitar jams to work their Southern bluesy magic. The top end extends beautifully to really bring out the ambience and spaciousness of the Fillmore.

Having recently finished playing a big ol' stack of these albums, we can tell you that most of them didn't sound very good. The majority of pressings are thick and opaque and lack the energy needed to bring the music to life.

We haven't played a MoFi of this in years, but we can't imagine they'd be able to make any sense of the punchy, rock 'em-sock 'em bottom end that's the hallmark of this album and the band's music in general. Tubby half-speed bass on the extended bass solo during "Mountain Jam"? No thank you.

What We're Listening For On Eat A Peach

• 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 common to most LPs.
• Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as 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 players.
• Then: presence and immediacy. The musicians aren't "back there" somewhere, way behind the speakers. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would have put them.
• 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 later 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.

A Must Own Rock Record

Eat A Peach is a recording that belongs in any serious rock music collection. Others that belong in that category can be found .