Rhino High Fidelity recently released this timeless rock classic as a one-to-one copy master tape, within just a couple of months of what was surely the ultimate release of this 1973 gem: the Analogue Productions UHQR 2 x 45rpm LP vinyl record.
So, how close does the ultimate vinyl release come to the sound of the master tape? Obviously there’s only one way to find out, and so I ordered both.
Legs, hot rods and Coca Cola
Until 1983’s Eliminator, specifically the smash hit singles Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man and Legs, I hadn’t really taken that much notice of ZZ Top: two men with Gandalf-style beards and a clean-shaven drummer named ‘Beard’. That was really about as much as I knew.
However, when the first of three singles, Gimme All Your Lovin’, hit the UK charts along with its sun-soaked video featuring a hot rodded Ford, a very cool classic Coca Cola machine and a trio of classically ‘80s style young women – well, I guess that finally got my attention. The follow up Sharp Dressed Man and the final number in the trilogy, Legs, cemented ZZ Top into my teenage psyche to the point that I bought the album. A few years later I followed up with Afterburner, though by that time I was becoming heavily entrenched in the new 1980s pop rock and kind of left ZZ Top at the gas station…
Kicking off with the Analogue Productions UHQR vinyl
Having taken care of the business of giving the two 45rpm Clarity Vinyl records an intensive clean, followed by a good demagnetisation, side one of four goes onto the turntable…
Disc 1 Side 1
As the needle drops, Gibbons’ soulful bluesy guitar leaps from the left and right speakers, hitting you simultaneously from both sides. Immediately following are Hill’s solid driving bass and Frank Beard’s boogie shuffling drums. Within seconds, the pace, energy and tone of this boogie-drenched blues rock album are defined. And oh my god, does it sound tremendous: turn up the volume then turn it up some more…
The sound is immediate, with incredible presence. The bass and drum impact are massive – real powerful thudding from the drums and a heavy hard ‘whump’ from the bass delivers a driving rhythm that keeps Waitin’ For the Bus fully charged with deep rocking energy. It’s enough to make you want to chug back an ice-cold beer on the spot.
The energy is tactile and, in the room, powerful and tight as hell. This is about as hard and heavy as vinyl gets. I’m put in mind of the self-titled Bad Company album on the Analogue Productions Atlantic 75th series. That stood out as a ‘holy moly’ vinyl record. This is another. If you’re not in the market for tape for whatever reason, then you don’t need to read much more. Just buy this UHQR. It will become a regularly played disc that will delight your friends as much as it annoys your neighbours…. The recording, mixing, and mastering have been achieved with intelligent choices made at every step. It’s one to turn up and rock out to. It’s an impressive achievement.
Segueing straight into Jesus Just Left For Chicago, the groove continues to power along with an incredible gravity. Groovy as all hell, sweet as a nut, not anything like the OTT eighties glitz-laden ZZ Top that I grew up with.
Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers features both Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons sharing the vocal lead. The track thunders along like a runaway steam engine. The beat is intense, powering along with its Southern rock, boogie-filled groove. Nothing here is pretentious, nothing feels irrelevant. This is just pure and simple shit-kicking, honest rock.
Disc 1 Side 2
Master of Sparks: For vinyl, these drums are mind-blowingly good: weighty, with incredible scale, impact and a solid heavy natural timbre. The space they occupy feels life-sized, and the bass has a matching weight overlaid with guitars and vocals that are smooth as silk and sweet as you like.
Hot, Blue and Righteous: Bloody hell, those drums again. Wonderfully weighted and with a stunning impact. Gibbons’ guitar is more lead than rhythm on this number and it feels lighter and more airy. Hill’s bass is still heavy as a buffalo charging straight at you. It reminds me of The Band: achingly beautiful Americana, bluesy country rock. The vocal harmonies, while not what I’d call the prettiest, are extremely poignant, again very much akin to The Band. Then the guitar goes into its sublime, smoochy lead break. Aching, moaning, and gorgeous…
Disc 2 Side 1
Disc 2 kicks off with Move Me On Down The Lines and the music leaps out from the speakers, just as surprisingly so as the first disc, inviting you to turn the volume knob clockwise… The overall sound balance, especially that lower end kick, begs you to turn it up. This record needs to be played LOUD!
Precious and Grace comes next: the dirty driving guitar, the metronomic, seismic drums and the steamroller bass. Everything is superbly weighted and properly meaty. The bass seems just a touch cleaner and tighter on this slightly faster tempo rocker. Halfway through, a steel guitar lead break takes off, deliciously soaring spectacularly over the dirty driving rhythm. Then to end, those almost visceral drums again.
La Grange: This, unless you grew up under a rock, is the track you’ll know like the back of your hand. It’s almost guaranteed to become the favourite. The vocal could almost be from John Lee Hooker, it’s that dirty and gritty – like a cowboy boot stubbing out a cigarette butt. The drum fill – phenomenal, fabulous and fantastic! I said it earlier but oh boy, I’ll say it again, this UHQR LP is one of the heaviest, grooviest, most rocking vinyl LP records I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing. It’s the definition of thundering wonderment! I’m beginning to wonder if, in this regard, whether the tape can match it. Logic tell me it must, since the record is made from the tape… right?
Disc 2 Side 2
Sheik opens side 4 with a clean, dynamic, massive weight. Gibbons’ gutsy growling vocal almost slurs out the lyrics. While this track is one of the funkier ones with more spiky guitar work, the overriding deep, muddy blues unpins the whole album. As Sheik closes, distant bells tinkling with sunlight and a deeply melodic bass provide a surprising contrast to the almost constant growling bluesiness.
Finally, to wrap up this stunningly sublime album Have You Heard? which slowly drifts from the speakers like a swampy gutsy rocker. Beard’s drums never stop being highly impressive. Honestly, as far as vinyl goes, this is outstanding. The sense of weight and impact is perhaps as close to tape as I’ve heard from anything on vinyl, and now I’m itching to make the ultimate comparison. The vocal harmonies meld into a swampy goodness, not the cleanest nor the clearest, but with such an honest deep and driving groove.
Summing up the UHQR: This is a truly impressive LP record. For most of my life I’ve been a vinyl vulture, scouring the used record shops of the land in the endless hunt for that elusive vinyl gem, and paying vast sums of money upgrading and fine tuning my record playing system. If enjoying the actual sonic experience of music is something that floats your boat, you’ll love this album. And remember, this is cut to be played LOUD!
Moving on to the Rhino High Fidelity Reel-to-Reel tape
Having played the mind-blowing UHQR, my expectation for the Rhino High Fidelity Reel to Reel is high. I load the tape, rewind back to the start and hit the play button… and WOW. My immediate impression is that the soundstage width just doubled and the guitars opened right up, but (there’s a but?)… does it match the impact of the UHQR?
Honestly, my initial impressions are a mix of pros and cons. In fact, it doesn’t take long to unravel what’s truly going on, but before I move onto that, let’s discuss those first impressions…
Initially, the UHQR actually sounded a touch more dynamic and weighted, specifically in the bass and kick drum dynamics. In contrast, the tape sounds a little more extended but less weighty, with perhaps less impact. Don’t get me wrong, the tape feels superior in terms of openness, space, clarity and intimate dynamism of the midrange and upper frequencies. It’s really just that lower end kick.
The tape’s openness, articulation, space and air, particularly manifest in the vocals which, by contrast, feel slightly muddier on the UHQR. The guitars, which never get harsh or gritty on the UHQR vinyl, open up on the tape and breathe with a dynamic openness that feels like a swift scything through the air. The tape’s intense openness and naturalness make the UHQR feel somewhat ‘smoothed out’ by comparison. And what about the rhythm section, Hill and Beard: am I saying they actually sound better on vinyl?
Well, no, but that’s really not so obvious at first. So, I’ll come back to this in my conclusion (bear with me).
As the tape plays, track after wonderful track, it becomes apparent that this unadulterated flat copy of the original master is truly the closest you’ll get to the natural flow, with every last ounce of detail, space, and the most subtle aspects of the original mix.
This same original master is, of course, what Matt Luthens at Analogue Productions used to create his UHQR masterpiece (more on which later).
I find myself getting more and more drawn into this wonderfully deep, phenomenally groovy, multi-layered masterpiece. The openness and dynamism of the tape, while startling, is never flashy or over the top. While the vinyl is smooth and silky, when compared directly to the tape it feels slightly rolled off so as to never offend, which results in a slight veiling of the upper registers and the vocals. As I’ve already said (waxed lyrical), the UHQR vinyl sounds exceptionally powerful for a vinyl record, but once I’ve listened to the tape a few times then it’s really quite hard to go back. There’s a complete natural ‘thereness’ about the Rhino tape which, as I’ve come to expect from tape, transcends anything you could ever get or do on vinyl, or digital for that matter.
But let’s rewind for a moment back to those first impressions I mentioned earlier… when I first put the tape on the Studer, I had some questions about the ‘kick’ of the bass and kick drum. They felt more present. What was going on there?
Mastering magic
After many, many listens, and a conversation with Analogue Productions’ Chad Kassem, I think this all boils down to Matt Luthens’ mastering magic.
It certainly took me a good few listens before the picture started to fall into focus: the bass and the drums definitely have more detail and texture on the tape but what Luthens has done for the UHQR is to increase the apparent ‘thwack’ of the rhythm section. It’s like he’s taken everything below, say, 50 hertz and pushed it up to 60 hertz, kind of ‘underwired’ the bass end, and substituted extension for punch. Think of it, if you will, like an underwired push-up bra – the effect isn’t entirely natural, but there’s a definite appeal about the ‘in your face’ effect (with apologies to female readers, I couldn’t think of any other underwiring analogy).
Returning to the tape, there’s no denying the more open sound, the wider channel separation, the height, the depth, etc. The layers of finer details that are already excellent on the vinyl are, on tape, more spacious, more airy and more real sounding. The upper end of the drum kit, cymbals, toms and the sweet kisses of the hi-hat leap out of the speakers with a more tangible energy. The bass and drums, instead of feeling ‘underwired’, form the foundation rather than the facade. More beneath and behind, rather than upfront outright slam, fitting into the whole and contributing to a more relaxed and natural slip-slidey boogie than the in your face driving beat of the UHQR.
In conclusion
Honestly, this is quite a difficult one to call. I can easily see why people might prefer either version.
The tape, as with pretty much every tape I have, is just what it is: a copy of the master. You get the feeling that you’re listening to the actual performance, or in the case of a studio album, that actual composition, the sum total of everything that went into the record, the product of the band and production team. It’s stunningly natural and real. To my taste it’s the ultimate, it’s the music.
However, there’s no denying the inspired vinyl mastering job that Matt Luthens has done and I can see why many of you out there might prefer his version. He’s mastered this for vinyl such that it feels even more intense, has more kick, and can be played LOUD.
And then I get curious about the sources. You’d assume that both came from the same source (and of course, ultimately, they did – everything ultimately comes from the original recording). However, on checking the documentation provided with each release I see that the Rhino High Fidelity tape is a flat copy of what appears to be the 1973 ‘London Records’ original master, “MASTER 1”. It even has, scrawled across the notes, various dates presumably correlating to when it was sent for disc cutting, duplication etc. Of particular interest: top-left of these notes there’s a date, 18th October 1978, which correlates to the date the tape shown on the UHQR documentation was received at Warner Bros. Now I’m thinking, could this suggest that a new master was made, re-equalised with the ‘underwired’ effect? But no… when I look a bit closer, taking careful note of the red and yellow sticky tape, it’s clear that these two labels are on either side of the same tape box. So, the sources are the same. The entire ‘push-up’ underwiring magic was done by Matt Luthens.
Now, some purists may claim that the Rhino tape hasn’t been mastered at all. But of course it has – it’s an exact copy of the original master i.e. the final mix, which has then been mastered: track running order arranged, volume-matched, equalised, and so on. Sure, it hasn’t been fettled for vinyl production, or for that matter compressed to death for radio airplay or streaming. But by definition, the original master has been mastered.
Anyway, whichever version you prefer, you can get your own copies here:
Vinyl https://store.acousticsounds.com/d/192721/ZZ_Top-Tres_Hombres-UHQR_Vinyl_Record
Tape https://store.rhino.com/products/tres-hombres-rhino-high-fidelity-r2r?variant=51013270601974
And now for a tad more rambling…
Dave Denyer: The Reel-to-Reel Rambler 