When you hear a good copy of Rumours, it’s very easy to understand why this is one of the best-selling pop music albums of all time.

It's tough finding Hot Stamper copies of this album. With over 75 sets of stamper numbers for each side, it's an extremely taxing project, even for us. We know some of the better stampers and have been acquiring them since then in preparation for this shootout.

What The Best Sides Of Rumours 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 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.

What We're Listening For On Rumours

Top copies of Rumours are full of Tubey Analog Magic. (Shockingly, the album before from 1975 is even more Tubey Magical, the most Tubey Magical album the band ever released as a matter of fact.)

The sound will be open, spacious and transparent with a huge three-dimensional soundfield.

On the better pressings Christine McVie's vocals are solid and present, 's breathy and clear.

The overall sound can be surprisingly rich, sweet and warm -- that's analog, baby!

Of special interest to those of us who like to rock is the fact that the best sides have tremendous weight, with factor that lets the energy of the recording (and the music) burst out of the soundfield.

Quick Listening Test - Dreams

What do the better copies have that the also-rans don't? Lots and lots of qualities, far too many to mention here, but there is one you may want to pay special attention to: the sound of the snare. When the snare is fat and solid and present, with a good "slap" to its sound, you have a copy with weight, presence, transparency, energy -- all the stuff we adore about the sound of the best copies of Rumours.

Next time you are on the hunt to buy new speakers, see which ones can really rock the snare on "Dreams." That's probably going to be the speaker that can do justice to the entire Rumours album, as well as anything by The Beatles, and Neil Young's Zuma, and lots of our other favorite records, and we expect favorites of yours too.

Extensive Track Commentary

We really spent some quality time on the track commentary for this one, so make sure you refer to it while comparing what we are saying to what you are hearing at home, using whatever copy you own.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found .

If you end up with one of our Hot Stampers, listen carefully for the effects we describe. -- everything has to be working in tip-top form to even begin to get this complicated music sounding the way it should -- but if you've done your homework and gotten your system really cooking, you are in for the time of your Fleetwood Mac life.

Stampers Galore

You would have to go through at least a dozen or more copies of Rumours to even hope to find one in a league with our best pressings. That's a lot of record hunting, record cleaning and record playing.

If you know anything about this record, you know that the average domestic pressing of this album is quite average sounding; the good ones are few and far between.

And the stampers, as we've come to learn, aren't the whole story. For one thing, there are at least 75 different side ones and 75 different side twos, all cut by Ken Perry at Capitol on the same three cutters from -- we're assuming, we weren't there -- the same tapes.

But of course they all sound different. Ken also cut the original English and Japanese pressings; his KP is in the dead wax for all to see. The two import KP copies that I heard were quite good, by the way. Not the best, but very good. He only cut the originals though, so practically every import copy you can find will be a reissue made from a dub, ugh.

Vinyl Condition

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. (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.

A Must Own Pop Record

This is a recording should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection. Others that belong in that category can be found .

Few would argue against this being the biggest, boldest statement by the Buckingham-Nicks iteration of Fleetwood Mac, one which we too consider to be their . Wikipedia defines the term as "a large and important work of art, music, or literature, especially one regarded as the most important work of an artist or writer."