More Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Records in Stock
More Commentaries and Letters for So Far
The All Music Guide considers this record to be a waste of money on CD because it was a slapped together effort to capitalize on CSN’s success, combining material from only two albums and then adding two unreleased tracks. Their attitude is that the first two records are essential, so why buy this album for two songs?
I’ll tell you why. Because finding good sounding pressings of either of the first two albums is practically impossible. I mean that literally: as a practical matter, it is nearly impossible to find Hot Stamper versions of the first two albums, especially Deja Vu.
The first album on Classic heavy vinyl is quite good, excellent in fact. I give it an A to A minus, or B plus, depending on which track you play [The grade now is B as I recall. Hard to give any Classic Record a higher grade than that.]
It’s as sweet and tonally correct as any Classic Record ever made. You can do better but the vast majority of the time you are going to do a lot worse. Classic also did Deja Vu, but the less said about that one the better.
However, if you made the mistake of buying the Classic Records version, a Hot Stamper version of this record will show you what you are missing on tracks like Deja Vu, Helpless and Woodstock. The difference should be night and day.
Further Reading
- New to the Blog? Start Here
- Helpful Advice on Cleaning Your Records
- Helpful Advice on Doing Your Own Shootouts
- The Kinds of Things You Too Can Learn from Experimenting with Records
Below you will find our reviews for the more than 200 Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years. Feel free to pick your poison.
Even as recently as the early 2000s, we were still impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings. If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem to favor these days.
We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the truth — that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.
Some audiophile records are so lacking in merit that I was pissed off enough to create a special list for them.
To our way of thinking, setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered counterparts, we know that our customers appreciate the difference.
