Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young playing on them are about the best we can do these days. We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this seminal band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites of mine and have been since they were first released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around) Thank god my older stepbrother had good taste in music. I doubt that many 14-year-olds were playing Buffalo Springfield albums, but I was, even though most of the time it was on 8-track tape.
On even the best copies I regret to say there’s a bit too much Tubey Magic in the bass. Tubbiness and bloat were par for the course. This may explain why so many copies have rolled off bass; the engineer cut the bass because he heard how tubby it was and figured no bass is better than bad bass.
Which is just not true. Cutting the bass leans out and “modernizes” the sound, making the voices sound thinner and dryer. Less rich. This pretty much ruins everything on this album, just the way it ruins everything in many of the modern recordings I hear.
Having your bass under control on the playback side isn’t easy — in fact it’s probably the hardest thing to achieve in audio — but it can be done, and with good bass control the slightly wooly bass is just a part of the sound you learn to accept.
It doesn’t actually interfere much with your enjoyment of the music, mostly because all the other instruments and voices sounds so magical.
The post-it notes you see are very old, probably from the early 2000s.
Until we got our cleaning system sorted in 2007, shootouts for any of this band’s first three albums were going to be tough sledding, if not downright impossible.
In this commentary we describe what needed to change in order to make Buffalo Springfield shootouts a reality.
Want to find your own killer copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. This album sounds its best:
Further Reading