Recently I started up a relationship with an industry guy who, based on what I heard playing my records on his quarter MILLION dollar system, needed a little help. His stereo did have a lot to like about it – size, space, depth, musicality. It was mainly the odd absence of an actual front firing tweeter in his big and quite beautiful open baffle speakers that left me scratching my head.
Fortunately, there was a fairly easy and effective solution for this problem. It wouldn’t fix everything that was going on with this system, but it would certainly be a big help. I offered to bring over my Townshend Supertweeters for him to try out, and much to my surprise, he agreed!
On the appointed day, after we played a wonderfully open and transparent copy of Everybody Digs Bill Evans I’d also brought with me, we connected the Supertweeters and were instantly reminded of why speakers have tweeters in the first place. Now we could hear how transparent and spacious the record was. We were practically breathing the air in the recording studio.
To his credit, he had no trouble appreciating the merits of this fix. After spending the next couple of hours rediscovering record after record from his collection, he reluctantly let me leave with my little magic boxes.
With a few more emails in follow up to our session, I convinced him to come to my listening room and let me play a few records for him on my system. The plan was to demo some interconnects he sells, as well as a passive power conditioner and maybe one or two other products.
Not too many months before, another industry guy, a gentleman who builds amplifiers and power conditioners, also came to me on my request to demo his integrated amplifier. He liked my stereo with his amp, and liked it a lot in fact.
But when I asked him if he was interested in hearing his competition, and I hooked up my amp, which I like a good deal more than his, his enthusiasm quickly deflated. “All I can hear is the sound of all those ‘cheap’ parts inside that ‘thing’.” Once again, the electronics of a golden era when “audiophile” was a rarely used moniker, got no respect.
My new industry friend, let’s call him Rick, the one with the tweeterless speakers, a heck of a nice guy who, instead of telling me all the things he must have thought I was doing wrong with my system, did me the welcome courtesy of sitting quietly in the sweet spot and . . . just listening. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was! He just sat and nodded his head and vocalized his appreciation for the wonderful music he was hearing, and how he was hearing it.
And sit in that sweet spot he did, much longer than I’d expected! Even after I’d removed my budget interconnects and installed his very expensive silver wire that he would have very much liked to sell me, and even after we’d plugged my EAR 324 into his ridiculously-priced passive power conditioner, there he sat. He appeared to be enjoying himself so much I didn’t have the heart to ask him to change seats with me so I could hear what his equipment was doing to / for the sound of my system.
Having learned my lesson from my demo with the amp builder, I made sure to play a record this time that sounded so damn good, it would have been near impossible for anyone listening to it on my system to be anything less than captivated. I played Rick my early pressing of Julie London’s debut, Julie Is Her Name.
As Julie London crooned what is arguably the definitive version of the Arthur Hamilton classic “Cry Me A River,” Rick and I sat transfixed. The track practically dripped with the sound of the tube electronics that, standard for the day, gave her performance an uncanny presence and compelling realness, gently saying circa 1955 while crying out right here, and right now.
There she was, long departed yet living and breathing, right there in front of us. It was a moment in analog audio that could not be denied, even by someone whose predilections for equipment choices stood in stark contrast to the unconventional yet undeniably musical system he was now hearing. It was a moment, I am happy to say, that infused a much needed dose of acknowledgement and credibility into my years-long endeavor to build a system that would exceed any and all expectations on how good a stereo playing a record can sound.
A few weeks later, Rick sent me an email saying he wanted to buy a copy of Julie Is Her Name and asked me which version I’d recommend. Seeing an opportunity to further our relationship, I offered to track down a good sounding copy of the record for him. I was, to be quite honest, eager to further my ambition of bringing my new friend, if not across the audio Mason Dixon line I’d crossed, at least within spitting distance of it. I hoped to give him a taste of what you get when you use great sounding copies of great sounding records to inform how you build your system, rather than his nutty-expensive tweaks and wires.
At the time, I had very little idea of what I was getting into. Who knew finding a single good copy of Julie Is Her Name that actually had 2 good sides that played well would be such a pain in my ass? I certainly didn’t.
My copy, the one I had played for Rick, was what I had to start with, that and the knowledge that the 60s reissues I’d heard were not very good. And my copy seemed at first like a solid place to start. That is until it occured to me that I always play the first track on the first side, and maybe I ought to flip the record over. When I did that and side 2 paled in comparison, I realized I had more work to do.
I started looking at the various versions of the record out there. Mine was one of several pressed at Scranton. There were others pressed at Los Angeles, Hollywood and Indianapolis. They all had different stampers and therefore all had different mastering. This was not going to be as easy as I’d thought.
There was nothing to do but put my head down and start buying copies. So I ordered a couple and waited. As the copies I ordered started to arrive, I realized I was in for even more headache. Most copies, despite the fact that the visual grades were accurate, played poorly. I soon started preemptively asking sellers to play-test them for me before I’d buy them, and a few of them did, sometimes revealing that the copy they had for sale was noisy too.
Some sellers would also comment on how “their personal copy” was also a little noisy. This reinforced that noisy vinyl was a big issue with the early pressings of this title. It also told me that some of the dwindling supply of copies for sale were rejects offered by fans of the record who were selling off copies that didn’t merit keeping.
To make matters worse, some copies, like my Scranton, sounded very good on one side and could range from mediocre to worse on the other. And while one side of a record sounding better than the other is not at all unusual, the difference in sound quality on each side in this case was unusually pronounced.
I knew Rick was in no position to spend hundreds of dollars on a record. Each time we’d gotten together he’d mentioned needing to make expensive repairs on his home, and once he told me his “wife would kill him” if he bought his own pair of Supertweeters. He even admitted to me at one point when I commented on how expensive the gear he sold was, that he himself couldn’t afford to buy his own products. Needless to say, I was going to be on the hook for any record I managed to find for him.
So when I started to crunch the numbers on what it was going to cost me to produce a copy of Julie Is Her Name that both sounded good and played well on both sides, I knew it was going to be more of a losing proposition than I’d imagined. So I found a copy with fairly good sound, some condition issues but that overall played reasonably well on both sides and I set it aside for him, moving on to other projects.
When Rick came over to pick up his record and demo one of his phono preamps, I played him the copy of Julie I’d found for him. Some noise on the first track that seemed pretty minor to me when I’d first played it was a non-starter for him. He hadn’t played all of the noisy copies I had, so I guess he just couldn’t appreciate how even a copy with the problems he was hearing was still a reasonably good playing copy. He left without taking the record with him.
The good news is that of the 5 copies of Julie I bought during my search, one has a wonderful second side that I’ve paired with the strong side 1 on my Scranton pressing. And even though I’m stuck with 2 copies of Julie that now I’ll have to try to sell (one I was thankfully able to return), both with condition issues, I learned some valuable lessons about this title, and about records in general.
Join me on my Youtube channel for more thoughts and insights into a record that, if you can manage to find the rare good copy, is about as great a female vocal record as you’re ever likely to hear. The right copy of Julie Is Her Name is as good as it gets, and well worth the headache.