Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
Years ago — precisely how many we can’t really say, the old listings for those records have been deleted — we thought the original pressings in the nameless cover you see pictured had the best sound.
We thought the pressings that came in this early cover were the ones that were made from the original mix, the mix that Neil later disowned. (More on that below.)
We had played a number of copies that came in the original cover, and they sounded better to us than the others we had auditioned.
Our mistake was not understanding that pressings made with the first mix and pressings made with the second mix both came in the early cover, and both were pressed on the Reprise Two Tone label.
Here is what we wrote some years ago:
It turns out the remixed pressings we’d been selling for years were not the way to hear this album at its best. Neil wanted his voice to sound clearer and more present than the first mix, but the approach the engineers took to increase the clarity and presence was simply to boost the middle and upper midrange, a boost that seriously compromises the wonderful Tubey Magic found in the rich lower midrange of the original mix.
Neil may have liked the sound of his voice better on the new mix, played back on whatever mediocre-at-best stereo he was using at the time, but we here at Better Records are of a decidedly different opinion. On a modern, highly-resolving system Neil’s voice will not sound the least bit “buried” on the original mix, not on the better pressings anyway. Of course, the better ones are the only ones we sell.
If you want to hear this album sound right, we strongly believe that the original mix is the only way to go. And if you want to hear this album sound really right, better-than-you-ever-thought-possible right, you need a copy that was mastered, pressed and cleaned properly, and that means a Hot Stamper from Better Records.
It turns out the stampers for the pressings we like are the ones made from the remixed tapes.
Now that we know which are the stampers that conform to the pressings made from the remixed tapes, we have to agree completely with Neil about the sound.
The copies with the earliest stampers, found on the two tone label in the original no-name cover, are not very good. Sometimes but not always awful, we had two copies and the best one had a decent side one, but it was still a very far cry sonically from the best of the pressings made from the remixed tapes.
Of all people, we should have known better.
We had made some assumptions about the pressings that came in the original jacket on the early two tone label, assumptions which turned out to be wrong and led us to believe the silly things we wrote above. Now we know better.
Here are the bad stampers complete with our notes for their at best second-rate sound. (Although side one of one copy was decent, we do not sell records that do not earn a grade of at least 1.5+ on both sides. More on the 1.5+ grade here.)
The Story Behind the Mix
Neil Young is the self-titled debut studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young following his departure from Buffalo Springfield in 1968, issued on Reprise Records. Some sources place the album’s release date on January 22, 1969, while other sources have the release date as Young’s 23rd birthday, November 12, 1968. It was then partially remixed and re-released in November 1969, but at no time has the album ever charted on the Billboard 200.
The album was released on January 22, 1969. The first release used the Haeco-CSG encoding system. This technology was intended to make stereo records compatible with mono record players, but had the unfortunate side effect of degrading the sound. Young was unhappy with the first release. “The first mix was awful”, he was reported as saying in Cash Box of September 6, 1969. “I was trying to bury my voice, because I didn’t like the way it sounded.”
The album was therefore remixed (as announced in Rolling Stone issue 47, from December 13), and re-released without Haeco-CSG processing. The words “Neil Young” were added to the album cover after what was left of the original stock had been used up, so copies of both mixes exist in the original sleeve. Copies of the original mix are now rare and sought-after, because many Neil Young fans believe that the remix diminished the songs, especially “Here We Are in the Years”.
Further Reading