*NOTE: There is a superficial mark on side 1 that does not play and cannot be heard.

These pressings have top-quality sound that's often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers ("relative" meaning relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don't agree, please feel free to return the record for a full , no questions asked.

This superb Hot Stamper pressing of L&M's fourth release demonstrates pretty convincingly just how well-recorded this album is. The bottom end is tight and punchy, and the clarity and transparency are truly off-the-charts.

When Jim Messina rips into his mandolin solo half way through "Be Free," your jaw is likely to hit the ground. On the better copies, it positively leaps out of the left speaker. I can't recall another pop or rock recording that captures either the plucked energy or the harmonic nuances of the instrument better. To hear such a well-recorded mandolin on a copy of this quality is nothing less than a thrill.

This copy gives us full-bodied pianos; rich, lively vocals, full of presence and brimming with enthusiasm; harmonically-rich guitars, mandolins, dobros and the like, as well as a three-dimensional soundstage that reveals the space around them all.

What The Best Sides Of Mother Lode 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 Loggins and Messina

What typically separates the killer copies from the merely good ones are two qualities that we often look for in the records we play: transparency and lack of smear. Transparency allows you to hear into the recording, reproducing the ambience and subtle musical cues and details that high-resolution analog is famous for.

Lack of smear is also important, especially on a recording with so many plucked instruments. The speed and clarity of the transients, the sense that fingers are pulling on strings -- strings that are ringing with tonally correct harmonics -- is what makes these L&M records so much fun to play. The better copies really get that sound right, in the same way that the better copies of Cat Stevens' records get the sound of stringed instruments right.

Here is a more comprehensive breakdown of what we were listening for when evaluating a Folk Pop/Rock album such as Mother Lode.

Clarity and Presence

Many copies are veiled in the midrange, partly because they may have shortcomings up top, but also because they suffer from blurry, smeary mids and upper mids. With so many mandolins and guitars on practically every song, dull, dead-sounding L & M pressings can't begin to communicate the musical values in this superb recording.

With a real Hot Stamper the sound is totally involving, and so is the music! You hear the breath in the voices, the pick on the strings of the guitars and mandolins -- these are the things that allow us to suspend our disbelief, to forget it's a recording we're listening to and not living, breathing musicians.

Top End Extension

Most copies of this album have no extreme highs, which causes the guitar harmonics to be blunted and dull. Without extreme highs, the percussion can't extend up and away from the other elements. Consequently, these elements end up fighting for space in the midrange and getting lost in the mix.

Transparency

Although this quality is related to the above two, it's not as important overall as the one below, but it sure is nice to have. When you can really "see" into the mix, it's much easier to pick out each and every instrument in order to gain more insight into the arrangement and the recording of the material.

Seeing into the mix is a way of seeing into the mind of the artist. To hear the hottest copies was to appreciate even more the talents of all the musicians and producers involved, not to mention the engineers.

Bass

No rock or pop record without good bass can qualify as a top quality Hot Stamper. How could it? It's the rhythmic foundation of the music, and who wants a pop record that lacks rhythm?

The best copies have prodigious amounts of fairly deep, note-like, well-controlled bass. If you have a high-fidelity full-range system, this is some serious Demo Disc Quality Pop Sound.

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.