Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing - an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Next: transparency - the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.

Tight punchy bass - which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.

Then transient information - fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.

The Big Sound comes next - wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.

They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. What could be more important than the life of the music? What We’re Listening For on Hasten Down The Wind We do, and it’s records like this that make the effort and expense of building a full-range dynamic system so rewarding. This is truly a KNOCKOUT disc if you have the equipment for it. If you have a Big System that really rocks you owe it to yourself to get to know his work. This is a shame the guy makes Demo Disc Quality Pop Records about as good as those kinds of records can be made. Garay gets anything like his due with audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them. (To be clear, only the best copies share it. They all share his trademark super-punchy, jump-out-the-speakers, rich and smooth ANALOG sound. Garay is the man behind so many of our favorite recordings: James Taylor’s JT (a Top 100 title), Simple Dreams (also a Top 100 title), Andrew Gold, Prisoner In Disguise, etc. Kudos once again must go to Val Garay, the co-engineer here with Dave Hassinger (who owns The Sound Factory where the album was recorded).

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. No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space.Natural tonality in the midrange - with all the instruments having the correct timbre.Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low.Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1976

The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing.The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space.

What the Best Sides of Hasten Down The Wind Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear We know because we cleaned and played it and listened to it critically in comparison to other copies, and we did it all by ourselves. We know that this copy is about as correct as can be. Some are thick, some are thin, some are too clean, some are not clean enough, every sonic issue you can imagine can be heard on this album if you have enough copies to play, and we had plenty. Perhaps the result of too much Aphex Aural Excitement? Some have a phony boosted top end, a subject we have discussed on Linda’s records before. If you own the record see if you don’t notice some of them on your own copy. Most pressings of this album have quite obvious problems. In other words, this is Classic Analog from the ’70s, recorded by none other than Val Garay, one of our favorite engineers. The sound is rich, smooth, full-bodied and natural on both sides. Like the best moments of the preceding nine, though, the best moments of Hasten Down the Wind will be with us a long, long time.” “Her big but pretty voice is a stunning instrument for expressing feelings, particularly intense feelings that require a slightly understated delivery… a fine album that begs closer inspection than, I fear, many of us are willing to give to Linda Ronstadt’s art.This copy is doing it all - huge, rich and lively, with Linda’s vocals reproduced to near perfection.

Ronstadt cd hasten down the wind