Polar Spells Quality

This is about vinyl records, about the quality of their pressings and cover printing. The subject may have lost some of its importance now that "everyone" is listening to CDs only. But in retrospect it's really another bunch of points to the Swedes. These are my own observations.

I love my POLAR singles. The covers are so beautiful and the sound quality is superb. The same goes with the albums, but with the 7" singles this has to be emphasized.

I remember the moment of my awakening. I had a sudden urge to listen to The Day Before You Came. I didn't want to hear it from The Singles album, because the tracks closer to the center are always more or less too much compressed hence making the sound quality inferior to a 7" single, which not only rotates faster, but also has more separate grooves. The grooves have to be separate in order to get a hi-fi sound.

Soooo... I put the single on the turntable. I had chosen the German Polydor pressing, no particular reason, just wanted to save my POLAR one, because it's the original. The music began and as Agnetha started to sing, I thought, did it really sound like this. I took it off and grabbed the POLAR version. Right from the start the difference is there, you can not miss it.

The Polar single delivers every bit of detail, while the German Polydor or the British Epic leaves most of it behind the clouds. The Polydor and Epic sound like they've used the The Singles album master to produce the singles. The album master, as stated before is heavily compressed.

What does compressed mean? I try to explain it in layman terms, being one myself. In short: the wide dynamic range is squeezed together. The result is a hearable loss of high and low voices (the bass and the treble).

Why is it done? Basically to fit more material on each side of an album. When you compress heavily the grooves can be very tightly close together, thus enabling the inclusion of more tracks. That's why the sound quality on most Various Artists compilation albums is so weak. If there are less tracks and the grooves are wider apart from each other, it means you can have a much wider dynamic range. Well, maybe not CD-level though.

Then after comparing The Day Before You Came, I went on to study a few other singles like One Of Us, Chiquitita, Under Attack and so on. It's the same thing with them all. The POLAR version is always superior to any other release. Why? Well, my dear readers, I don't know, but I do give a damn... I suspect that either Björn, Benny, Michael B. Tretow or all of them together were monitoring the pressing. There must have been test pressings made and B&B with Tretow have probably okayed the good ones and disapproved the mediocre ones. So in every case only the best quality pressing was put on the production line.

This unfortunately also explains why all the other pressings lose when compared to POLAR. It's to do with the moral (or lack of it) of the foreign record companies representing ABBA. In other countries they probably just weren't that particular about the quality. As long as people were satisfied with lower quality, the money kept rolling in...

Two really good examples of bad quality pressing in my record collection are the Mexican RCA version of The Visitors and Super Trouper on U.S. Atlantic. The Visitors sounds so muffled that if eyes closed, you'd think you were listening to it from another room. That is a great pity of course since it includes those Spanish versions. Now of course I have them on CD, but they don't sound much better on Mas Oro, which contrary to the popular belief is NOT remastered. On Super Trouper album the hole in the middle of the record is not quite in the middle. This causes a "wow" -effect, all the more audible as the needle approaches the center. Lay All Your Love On Me intro and choruses, with those long chords, sound horrible - actually just thinking about it makes me nauseate.

As for the sleeves, I guess only a fool would prefer the CD booklet to an album cover. Take Super Trouper or The Visitors for example, the amount of detail one misses when looking at the CD is enormous.

The POLAR sleeves also seem to have been printed on a stronger material than, for example, the German equivalent. Same goes with the 7" single sleeves. I don't suppose that there are many German ABBA single-sleeves still available in very good condition. I mean the material being so weak. It's clearly recycled paper, which of course today seems like a good thing, I just wish it was of better quality.

I have One Of Us on Italian Epic that has a very bad quality sleeve, The material is O.K., but the printing leaves much to be desired. It's the same pic as on The Visitors cover and the POLAR single sleeve too, only much worse printing. Refer to John Toblers ABBA For The Record if you wanna see some not-so-good-quality-printing. That book is printed in Italy by the way. Now I don't have anything against Italians or Germans for that matter, I'm just telling you things I can see with my own two eyes here. However, before it gets all too negative, I feel I have to stress that there is one place outside POLAR territory where it was possible to enjoy both top quality record pressing and cover printing. That's Japan. Judging by the two ABBA records I have, The Winner takes It All 7" single and Voulez-Vous album. I'd say they're on the POLAR level - The Winner Takes It All perhaps scores even higher.

All rights assigned to Polar Music International

The POLAR Music went International after Arrival was released, some time fall 1976 / winter 1977. After that all the previous ABBA albums (and Arrival) were reprinted with sleeves carrying the line: "1976 all rights assigned to Polar Music International". If your album does not carry that line then you probably have the original pressing.

There is also a notable difference in the Arrival inner sleeves between the original and the "1976-all-rights-assigned-to-Polar-Music-International" -version. The two versions are shown above. The original being the one on the left.

I have two slightly different sleeves for The Album as well. The other one has the info: All keyboards: Benny Andersson while the other one omits it. The "Benny-version" states further that the distribution is by EMI (?). I don't know which one is the original.

The original Super Trouper sleeve had false timings for Me And I, Our Last Summer and The Piper. They were probably corrected by the time the second printing was made. It's interesting to study these timings. Me And I is one minute shorter (which it should have been IMHO), Our Last Summer looks like it was some 30 seconds longer, perhaps there was an intro and finally The Piper seems to have originally been one verse and chorus longer. The scan on the right is from the original POLAR-cassette sleeve.

If you are interested in reading more about the fabulous Polar singles -
Here's another discovery I've made.

---

©Kari S. 1998