More of the Music of Stephen Stills
Reviews and commentaries for Stephen Stills’ debut
One of our good customers wrote us a letter recently about his Stephen Stills Hot Stamper pressing.
You can read his first letter here.
About a week later he followed up with this one. It seems he fell in love with it. That can happen when you play a good sounding copy after nearing nothing but junk your whole life.
Hi Tom,
That NWHS [more here] of Stills’ first is EPIC! It is now in my top ten desert island discs.
I no longer have words… it’s just f**king epic. Obviously, I had no idea… not a clue.
After closed eyes listening to the last song on side 1, I was like WTF, that was really really intense… vocals… guitars.
So when it was done I looked at the back of the cover to see what was what… aha… Clapton!
It has been a long time since I’ve connected with whatever it was that I connected with on this LP.
What a gift. Simply outrageous sound.
Michel
Michel,
You and I both know that the connection you speak of is the only one that matters when listening to music.
That Stills record is definitely going to my desert island too. I bought mine in 1970 and I listen to it to this very day.
I’ve written a fair amount about the album. Used to use it as a test disc, something I have not discussed on this blog because there are not enough hours in the day to talk about all the records I have used as test discs. But this album make a great test disc if you’ve got big speakers and like to play them good and loud.
Here is an excerpt from an older commentary discussing Bill Halverson‘s superb engineering.
Some of the most sought-after records in the world, as well as the most difficult to find with high quality sound, are those involving the various groupings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
This album is no exception. It’s Stills’ masterpiece, a record I’ve been playing since I was in high school. The sound on the LPs I bought over the years has been pretty consistently disappointing. It’s refreshing to actually find a copy like this that lets you hear the album the way you remember it.
There’s a very good chance — bordering on a certainty — that the copy you played back then was no doubt just as poor sounding, but you remember it sounding good.
That, more than anything else, is why we audiophiles keep chasing after so many classic albums from our younger days. We’re trying to find the record that can give us the musical satisfaction in the present that we achieved so easily in the past, before we knew anything about audio and record pressings.
Thanks for writing,
Best, TP
Stephen Stills’ Debut Checks Off Some Big Boxes for Us
- It’s a Must Own record.
- It’s a rock and pop masterpiece.
- It’s a personal favorite of mine.
- And it’s a record I have been obsessed with for a very long time, since I bought my first copy in 1970 as a matter of fact. It’s records like this that made me want to go as far as I could in this hobby in order to hear them at their best. Little did I know how long that would take, close to 40 years in the case of Still’s debut.
The blog you are on now as well as our website are both devoted to very special records such as these. We charge a lot of money for them, but there are no other pressings in the world that can compete with them sonically.
Further Reading
- More Hot Stamper testimonial letters
- More Demo Discs for big speakers that play at loud levels
- Some of our customers find their Hot Stamper pressings are a revelation
