Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now
The All Music Guide considers So Far 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 boils down to the idea 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 for the average audiophile record collector.
I mean that literally: as a practical matter, it is very, very difficult to find Hot Stamper versions of the band’s first two releases. This is especially true for the self-titled album from 1969, which sounds best in our experience on a later reissue that we have a devil of time finding and therefore rarely have in stock.
Both the first two albums and So Far are records we credit with helping us dramatically improve the playback quality of our system.
A Few Words About Deja Vu
Deja Vu is a special album for me, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.
I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the care no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.
Years went by and then, oddly enough, my love for the music was reignited by a pressing that came out 13 years after the album’s original release, on a label you may have heard of, Mobile Fidelity.
I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound. (Not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are.)
It would take me and my staff many years, at least another 13 or so, to come across the domestic reissues that trounced the MoFi and showed me how colored, compressed, thick, blurry and limited it was.
Eventually another domestic pressing, and now most recently an import (!), came to be seen as clearly superior to all of these, the result of having never given up the search for a better Deja Vu.
Further Reading