I almost fell for it! AGAIN! Several years ago I had a well loved copy of Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Leonard Cohen and passed it on because, at the time, it didn’t sound very good to me. Meanwhile my copy of The Best of Leonard Cohen sounded WAY BETTER, and even after countless hours of listening and many, many improvements to my system, I almost got suckered into thinking that. AGAIN!!!

I’ve been buying and playing copies of Songs . . . over the past few weeks and noticing something about it. It’s not an easy record to find good sound for! The good news is that finding a copy with lots of bass is not a problem, it’s the top end that’s hard to get right on most copies. It’s also the top end that appears to set the better copies apart from the also rans.

A stereo without a lot of bass has a hard time revealing a record that doesn’t have any either, and mine was just such a stereo back when I decided that The Best of . . . would do just fine in place of the 1A / 1A Columbia  2-eye I had a hard time making sense of at the time. Now that I have a system that can deliver the low end of this recording, it’s clear that the HEAVY bass on it is, in fact, one of its essential features.

Despite the fact that I’ve found my conclusions from a few years back about which records sound good and which don’t increasingly unreliable, I couldn’t help pulling out my copy of The Best of . . .  to find out if, just maybe, it could serve as a suitable reference for the sound of the tracks from Songs . . . that appear on it – tracks that were simply not coming to life on the copies I had to play. Such was my lack of progress in finding a copy of Songs . . . that could offer a suitable glimpse of what was possible for this fabulous record.

Then last night, at lower than optimal listening volume, I played my copy of The Best of Leonard Cohen, and once again wondered why in the HELL I was BOTHERING to find a good copy of Songs. . . when this copy of The Best of . . . was sounding so very good to me. And once again, I’m very sorry to say, I was failing miserably to understand what exactly it was that this recording needed in order blossom.

Today I had a chance to play The Best of. . .  at a proper listening volume and compare it to the less than thrilling copy of Songs . . . that had managed to lazily rise to the top of the heap. FINALLY I realized what it was that had me confused. FINALLY I understood WHY my copy of The Best of . . . was sounding SO much better to me than Songs . . . The bass, was. . . GONE!

Take away the bass on a record and what have you got? PLENTY of top end and upper midrange. If you master a record from a good tape and you simply remove the lower frequencies, arguably the most problematic and difficult to reproduce part of the recording, then you have a genuine recipe for rookie audiophile nirvana. You have lots of clean and clear top end and upper midrange without the troublemaking lower mids and bass to cause any mischief.

DON’T BE FOOLED BY BASS SHY RECORDS! Build a system that can reproduce bass. Period! And until you’ve done that, don’t trust any of your conclusions about ANY of the records you play. Trust me! You’ll never be able to fairly evaluate a record until you can hear EVERTHING that’s on it, and until you have a stereo that can reveal the lower frequencies you’re simply NOT hearing everything that’s on your records. At least not the records that have bass, and any record without good bass is not even a good sounding record, let alone a great one.