Vintage 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.

Drop the needle on this bad boy and you will find yourself on a Yes journey the likes of which you have never known. And that's what we're in this audiophile game for. The Heavy Vinyl crowd can have their dead-as-a-doornail, wake-us-when-it's-over pressings that play quietly. We couldn't sit through one with a gun to our head.

With the amazing at the board, as well as the best batch of songs ever to appear on a single Yes album, they produced both their sonic and musical masterpiece -- good news for audiophiles with who like to play their records loud.

These guys -- and by that we mean this particular iteration of the band, the actual players that were involved in the making of this album -- came together for the first time and created the sound of Yes on this very album, rather aptly titled when you think about it.

What The Best Sides Of The Yes Album 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.

What We're Listening For On The Yes Album

The main qualities we look for when we shootout Yes records are:

1. Dynamics - The better copies have amazing dynamics. Some parts of this album should be startling in their power. There is a fair amount of compression on this recording in places, don't get me wrong, but on the right copies many passages of this music will have tremendous life and energy.

2. Smoothness - This album can be harsh and unpleasant if the upper midrange is boosted at all, or lacks a full lower midrange to balance it out. The last thing in the world you want is a bright, harsh Yes record.

3. Bass - Bass definition and weight are crucial to the sound of this record. The thin-sounding copies rob Yes's music of much of its power and are downgraded severely for it.

The Seventies - What a Decade!

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 remasterings).

This is some of the best high-production-value rock music of the 70s. The amount of effort that went into the recording of this album is comparable to that expended by the engineers and producers of bands like Supertramp, ELP, The Who, Jethro Tull, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd and far too many others to list. It seems that no effort or cost was spared in making the home listening experience as compelling as the recording technology of the day permitted.

Big Production Tubey Magical British Prog Rock just doesn't get much better than The Yes Album.

Big Prog

Yes easily qualifies as one of the handful of bands to produce an immensely enjoyable and meaningful body of work throughout the 70s, music that holds up to this day. Their albums, so musically multi-faceted and multi-layered, will surely reward the listener who takes the time to dive deep into the complexities of their sound.

Repeated plays are the order of the day. The more critically you listen, the more you are apt to discover within the exceedingly dense mixes favored by the band.

And the better your stereo gets the more you can appreciate the care and effort that went into the production of their recordings.

Shooting Out the Tough Ones

Yes albums always make for tough shootouts. Like Pink Floyd, a comparably radio-friendly Pop Prog band, their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to recording makes it difficult to translate their complex sounds to disc, vinyl or otherwise. Everything has to be tuned up and on the money before we can even hope to get the record sounding right.

Careful VTA adjustment could not be more critical in this respect.

If we’re not hearing the sound we want, we keep messing with the adjustments until we do. There is no getting around sweating the details when sitting down to test a complex recording such as this. If you can’t stand the tweaking tedium, get out of the kitchen (or listening room as the case may be).

Obsessing over every aspect of record reproduction is what we do for a living. Yes’s recordings require us to be at the top of our game, both in terms of reproducing their albums as well as evaluating the merits of individual pressings.

When you love it, it’s not work, it’s fun. Tedious, occasionally exasperating fun, but still fun nonetheless.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus 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.

A Must Own Rock Record

We consider this album the group's . It's a recording that belongs in any serious rock collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found .