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"*NOTE: There is a mark that plays 18 times at a moderate level about 1/2 way into the last track on side 1, \"Turn My Back On You.\"\nVintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG\n\nHaving done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Sade singing live in your listening room. The best copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.\nIf you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.\nWhat The Best Sides Of Stronger Than Pride Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear\n\nThe biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space\nThe 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 even as late as in 1988\n\nTight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low\nNatural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre\nTransparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space\n\nNo 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.\nWhat We're Listening For On Stronger Than Pride\n\n\nEnergy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?\nThen: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't \"back there\" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.\n\nThe Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.\nThen transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.\n\nTight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.\nNext: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.\n\nExtend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.\n\nSize and Space\nOne of the qualities that we don’t talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record’s presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small — they don’t extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don’t seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.\nOther copies — my notes for these copies often read “BIG and BOLD” — create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They’re not brighter, they’re not more aggressive, they’re not hyped-up in any way, they’re just bigger and clearer.\nWe often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three dimensional? We sure didn’t, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation.\nThink about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded that open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one of two clean British original copies with which to do a shootout? These records are expensive and hard to come by in good shape. Believe us, we know whereof we speak when it comes to getting hold of original British pressings of popular albums.\nOne further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it’s an entirely different – and dare I say unforgettable — listening experience.\nVinyl Condition\nMint 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.)\nThose 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.\nIf 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."
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