Since this is one of the best sounding Beatles recordings, this could very well be some of the best sound you will ever hear on a Beatles album.

There's wonderful ambience and echo to be heard. Just listen to the rimshots on "Michelle" -- you can clearly hear the room around the drum. On the best pressings, "Michelle" is incredibly 3-D; it's one of the best sounding tracks on the entire album, if not the best.

reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

This vintage Parlophone pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If 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.

What The Best Sides Of This Vintage UK Pressing Of Rubber Soul Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The 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 in
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No 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.

Acoustic Guitars and Tambourines

After playing so many copies of this record over the last few years, all of us here at Better Records have come to appreciate just how wonderful an album Rubber Soul really is. It has 14 fairly compact, well-structured, well-arranged pop songs, each of which is a gem in its own right. It reminds me a bit of the second album (With The Beatles) in that respect -- short and to the point, get in and get out.

But the second album does not feature acoustic guitars the way Rubber Soul does. From an audiophile point of view, the strumming of those lovely acoustic guitars is in large part what makes Rubber Soul such a special recording.

But what we've noticed only recently is how much the tambourine is used. It's all over this album, and the good news is that most of the time it sounds great. There are other high frequency percussion instruments -- shakers and the like -- and between the tambourine and all the rest, there's just a lot of percussive energy on most of the songs that really carries them along. To me, this could be called The Tambourine Album. No other Beatles album features that instrument so boldly in the mix and builds so many songs around it.

As you've no doubt read on the site more than once, a good LP allows you to appreciate the music even more than the sound. You feel like you are listening to what The Beatles wanted you to hear, the way they wanted you to hear it. With some minor quibbles, this British pressing sounds like it was made from the real tape, mastered the way The Beatles wanted it to be mastered -- and even pressed on pretty darn quiet vinyl.

What We're Listening For On Rubber Soul

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: 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 -- in this case, assisted by the legendary -- would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Where Can I Find Your Mono Beatles Records?

We do not sell Beatles records in mono.

And they didn’t even do the stereo mixes right some of the time, in our opinion. But wall to wall beats all stacked up in the middle any day of the week.

If you like mono Beatles records you will have to do your own shootouts for them, because we have never heard a mono Beatles record sound good enough to compete with our Hot Stamper stereo pressings.

Vinyl Condition

Mint 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.)

Those 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.

If 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.

Track by Track Commentary

Rubber Soul is one of the most difficult Beatles records to get to sound right. The individual tracks seem to vary drastically in terms of their sound quality. Some ("What Goes On") sound sweet, rich and near perfect. Others ("You Won't See Me") can be thin and midrangy. What's a mother to do?

I think what we're dealing with here are completely different approaches to the final mix. The Beatles were experimenting with different kinds of sounds, and their experiments produced very different results from track to track on this album more than practically any other I can think of besides The White Album (which, as you know, was recorded in multiple studios by multiple producers and engineers).

"Nowhere Man" on side one and "Wait" on side two are both excellent test tracks. Click on the Tracklist tab above to read more about them both, along with plenty of What to Listen For advice.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found .

A Must Own Beatles Record

It's a recording that should be part of any serious popular music collection. Others that belong in that category can be found .