As a collector I’ve accumulated so many great records over the years that with some albums, particularly some of the “classics,” I tend to assume I know the record so well that I rarely play it. Such was the case with Santana’s sophomore effort Abraxas. What other songs are on this record besides “Oye Como Va” and “Black Magic Woman”? Beats the hell out of me. I expect I’m not alone as someone who bought this record and may have never played side two.
But a few weeks ago I started playing Abraxas quite often, realizing that if I HAD ever played side 2, I certainly didn’t pay all that much attention. A friend of mine owns a hot stamper of Abraxas and he agreed to loan it to me. I’d bought and sold a few copies of it over the years, none of which had ever sounded very good to me until I finally stumbled on one that was clearly worth keeping. When I got hold of my friend’s hot stamper and slid it out of the sleeve, I was rewarded seeing it had the exact same stampers as the copy I owned.
Then a short time after I found another copy of Abraxas with similar but slightly different stampers at a brick & mortar. That one, on first listen, also impressed me. I began to think, could finding a good sounding copy of Abraxas be easier than I’d originally thought?
Last week I had a chance to take a deep dive with all three copies, and as often happens with these dives, at least the more successful ones, I learned some things about Abraxas that I hadn’t appreciated before. For one, I learned that I’d previously known next to NOTHING about it. Not really. And with some new insights I gained a whole new appreciation for the album.
I’ve written here and there on this site about listening volume, but I’ll take this opportunity to say it again. LOUDLY!!! Some records simply MUST BE PLAYED LOUD! And if we don’t play them that way we may struggle to appreciate what these records are all about. As I pile up examples of the experience of playing a record that sounds good, and then playing it louder and having the “Ah Ha!” moment of hearing it sound UNBELIEVABLE and finally “GETTING it”, the notion of listening volume as key to optimizing both sound quality and artistic appreciation becomes increasingly more compelling.
Listening at higher volume has also become ESSENTIAL for me to effectively evaluate records, particularly when trying to suss out the more subtle differences between 2 strong copies. This has been the driving force behind the system changes I’ve made over the past several years. It’s not too hard to get records to sound good at lower volumes, but it’s near impossible to get the best sounding records to sound their best if your system doesn’t perform well at live listening levels.
If you’re someone who doesn’t tend to turn up the volume when you listen, then hopefully you’re not also someone who endeavors to critically evaluate your records. With many records an accurate evaluation at lower volumes simply cannot be done. And if the reason you’re not turning up the volume to a place that at least approaches live listening levels is because your system doesn’t sound good at those levels, then by all means enjoy your records and leave SERIOUS critical listening for when it does. Of course it goes without saying you may also want to do some work on your system.
The other thing I learned about Abraxas during my modest shootout was that even though I thought I was playing it loud enough, I actually wasn’t. How high to do you have to go to fully appreciate the intensity, the FEROCITY of Santana’s guitar work on this record? Pretty darn high! And as I increased the volume I noticed how much BIGGER and WEIGHTY the instruments got. How big? Well, big like they would be if the band were performing right there in front of me big.
What I came to appreciate during this shootout was that Abraxas is not just a solid rock album combining classic rock and latin music, but a veritable TOUR DE FORCE of a record with as much POWER and PASSION as any record I can think of. With the exception of “Samba Pa Ti,” which strikes me as an odd pairing of a light-ish, almost breezy melody with the still very loud, hard rocking and HIGHLY electric sound of the recording, the band is not so much playing these songs as flat out ATTACKING them!
In the shootout, my copies held there own fairly well against the first side of my friend’s hot stamper. That would be the A++ or “Super Hot” side 1. Both were nearly as good or fairly close. But playing the “Nearly White Hot” side 2 with a modest 1/2 “+” higher rating was the difference between a record that seems to be doing everything right and one that actually is. On that side, the band quite simply CAME TO LIFE!
The moment I really HEARD the difference between these copies and I understood why that extra 1/2 “+” mattered, came during the intro to “Hope You’re Feeling Better.” It was an experience I’ve had several times and that I’ve talked about here before, an experience where the music suddenly changes from the sum of its many parts and coalesces into a fully coherent and compelling whole. In this case, the heretofore vague outlines of the band members performing suddenly became clear and there I was, ROCKING my goddamn ASS off with Santana!
If you’ve read much at all on this site you know I lean toward the dramatic. Heck if you read the last paragraph you know that! Do you really NEED a white hot stamper of Emerson, Lake & Palmer like I stated here in no uncertain terms not so long ago? Of course you don’t. Just like you don’t really NEED a $10k turntable or a $6k phono stage. You don’t NEED them, but they sure are pretty darn nice to have to play your records with, especially if those records are hot stampers.
Perhaps the reason I infuse so many of my articles with more than a bit of drama and, dare I say, hyperbole, is that I do feel pretty strongly about much of what I write about on this site, and I’m trying to GET YOUR ATTENTION! There’s more to analog than I feel most audiophiles realize, and the better it’s done the more apparent that gets.
My not so humble opinion on analog is this – it’s worth spending some extra money, taking some extra time and making the extra effort to push our record collections and our systems to the place where we can put on a record and hear what it was like when the artists made the recording, or at least as close to that as we can get.
My copies of Abraxas are both very good, perhaps even excellent sounding copies of the album. But neither of my copies conveyed the experience of the live performance the way the second side of my friend’s hot stamper did. I expect he paid an extra $100 for the record just because it has that side, and in my estimation it was worth every penny. That extra cost? That’s the extra money, time and effort it took to put together a large enough sample size of copies with good stampers to find that EXCEPTIONAL copy that REALLY stood out.
Once I heard the album THAT way, I simply could not un-hear it, and as good as they are, it was hard to go back to my copies. If I owned one that sounded like my friend’s, that record would likely be in heavy rotation. Now that I’ve returned it, neither of mine, I expect, will be. Fortunately there are still plenty of other available copies out there and I plan to keep buying and playing them until I either find the right copy or decide to bite the bullet and buy a hot stamper. That is, IF Better Records puts one up for sale!
I got a recent comment on my much-criticized and recently revised article on the Blue Note Tone Poet reissues. In that comment I was taken to task for suggesting that collectors should forgo these reissues and their rather modest $35 price for hot stamper jazz records from Better Records for far more money. This comment ignores the fact that I posted another article shortly thereafter in which I recommended some wonderful and pretty affordable jazz reissues that actually DO have the potential to deliver great sound in ways that the BNTP’s simply never will.
In any case, I do recommend buying records from Better Records, whole-heartedly! But that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting we build our entire collections from their inventory. With a little extra time and effort we can find our own great sounding records. Absolutely we can! But to do it we need A LOT of time, no small amount of money and a fair bit of luck, not to mention a great sounding analog system.
Nevertheless, I expect there are quite a few other Better Records fans out there who have done what I’ve tried to do and HACK the hot stamper. We do a little digging, find out what version of a record is likely to be good sounding and then we roll the dice and buy a copy, maybe two and clean them up spick and span with our Walker fluids. Eventually we find one we like, check that box and then move on to the next one. Simple, right?
Hopefully those of you who have tried this approach will do two things. One, KEEP DOING IT! In fact, do even more of it as you’ll learn A LOT about the records you buy and about what makes a great record sound great in general. And two, realize as I have that while you may get close to the sound you get from some hot stampers, most of the time you will fall short.
I have several records now with these “Nearly White Hot” sides and some even with “White Hot” sides and I’ve bought other copies of some of these with the SAME EXACT STAMPERS. Thus far, NOT ONE has been able to beat the hot stampers. Literally NOT ONE!
Quite simply put, you cannot HACK THE HOT STAMPER! Which is to say there are no shortcuts to a truly great sounding record. Sure, you can find some very good sounding records without breaking the bank, and you might get lucky once in a blue moon and find one that’s truly exceptional. Finding the diamond in the rough that outshines a whole slew of other strong copies? That’s hard to do. But as I said, KEEP TRYING!