About For LP Fans Only (Speakers Corner) by Elvis Presley:
Along with the album "A Date With Elvis" (RCA LPM-2011), "For LP Fans Only" is one of the most important special productions of the young King of Rock’n’Roll. Because Elvis had been conscripted into the US army, no new recordings could take place, and so record producers delved deep into the sound archives and dug out a few singles from his Sun Records days, mixed them with a couple of early RCA songs and a number from the "Love Me Tender" soundtrack, and, hey presto! a new Elvis LP was born. The overwhelming success of this album is not solely confined to the stylistic homogeneity of this collection of fresh, youthful songs. Far more, it’s because for many fans the record offered the only substitution for the highly coveted but rare original singles "That’s All Right", "Mystery Train" and "My Baby Left Me".
Not without reason has today’s 'bits-and-bytes' generation ignored the words on the cover and produced several re-releases. Which just goes to emphasise the widespread opinion that this is one of Elvis’s very best albums and at the same time one of the most important in the whole of rock’n’roll – especially in the present vinyl pressing.
Musicians:
- Elvis Presley (guitar, vocal)
- Various Bands
About Speakers Corner
At the beginning of the 90s, in the early days of audiophile vinyl re-releases, the situation was fairly straightforward. Companies such as DCC, Mobile Fidelity, Classic Records and, of course, Speakers Corner all maintained a mutual, unwritten ethical code: we would only use analogue tapes to manufacture records.
During the course of the present vinyl hype, many others have jumped on the bandwagon in the hope of securing a corner of the market. Very often they are not so ethical and use every imaginable source to master from: CDs, LPs, digital files, MP3s – or employed existant tools from the 80s and 90s for manufacturing.
A digital delay is gladly used when cutting a lacquer disc because tape machines with an analogue delay have become quite rare and are therefore expensive. When cutting the lacquer, the audio signal is delayed by one LP revolution against the signal, which controls the cutter head, and for this a digital delay is very often employed. Of course, the resultant sound signal is completely digital and thus only as good as this delay.
We should like to emphasise that Speakers Corner Records on principle only uses the original master tape as the basis for the entirely analogue cutting of lacquer discs. In addition, the pressing tool is newly manufactured as a matter of principle. We have one digital recording in our catalogue (Alan Parsons / Eye In The Sky“), but even in this particular case we used the analogue tapes for cutting.
We only employ existing tools for manufacturing if an improved result is not forthcoming, e.g. the title Elvis Is Back, which was mastered by Steve Hoffman and Kevin Gray, or several titles from our Philips Classics series, which in any case Willem Makkee cut from the original masters at the Emil Berliner Studios in the 90s. It goes without saying that we only used the mother and that new tools were made for our production.
To put it in a nutshell: we can ensure you that our releases are free from any kind of digital effects – excluding the exception above – and that the lacquer discs are newly cut.
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