More of the Music of David Crosby
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of David Crosby
What do you get with our best Hot Stampers compared to the Classic Heavy Vinyl reissue?
On high quality equipment, you can expect to hear improvements in all of the following areas:
- Dramatically more warmth,
- Dramatically more sweetness,
- Dramatically more delicacy,
- Dramatically more transparency,
- Dramatically more ambience,
- Dramatically more energy,
- Dramatically more size (width and height),
- Dramatically more correct timbres (without the boost to the top and the bottom end that the Classic suffers from).
in other words, the kind of difference you almost ALWAYS get comparing the best vintage pressings with their modern remastered counterparts, if our first hand experience with thousands of them can be considered evidentiary.
The Classic is a decent enough record. I might give it a “C” or so. It’s sure better than the Super Saver reissue pressing, but that is obviously setting a very low bar. No original I have ever played did not sound noticeably better than Bernie’s recut.
A Hot Stamper of an amazing recording such as this is a MAGICAL record. Can the same be said of any Classic Records release? None come to mind.
By the way, the remastered CD that came out in 2011 (I think that’s the one I have) is excellent, with a surprising amount of the Tubey Magic that is on the original tape. On a good CD player it would be clearly superior to the Classic vinyl, and for that reason, we say buy the CD.
Here are some records we’ve reviewed that are lacking in the same qualities as this pressing of David Crosby’s first album. If you own any of the titles that we’ve linked to below, listen for their shortcomings and see if your copy doesn’t sound the way we’ve described the copies we’ve played.
- Records lacking in warmth,
- Records lacking in sweetness,
- Records lacking in delicacy (they’re crude)
- Records lacking in transparency (they’re opaque),
- Records lacking in space,
- Records lacking in energy,
- Records lacking in ambience,
- Records lacking in size (width and height),
- Records lacking in naturalness
- Records that are boosted on the top end
- Records that are boosted on the bottom end
Further Reading
There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are awful. (Some, of course, are good, and we don’t mind saying so.)
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.
Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.
(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and record collecting in the Seventies.)
How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how bad these records sound.
Maybe not this guy, or the “In Groove” guy, but there has to be at least some group of audiophiles out there, however small their number might be, with decent equipment and two working ears, right?
Excluding our customers of course, they have to know what is going on to spend the kind of money they spend on our records. And they write us lots of enthusiastic letters telling us so.