Hot Stamper Pressings of Country and Country Rock Available Now
In 2025 we finally got around to doing another shootout for Buffalo Springfield’s wonderful Retrospective album, a “greatest hits” compilation for a band that really only had one hit but put out two of my all time favorite albums, Buffalo Springfield Again and Last Time Around. Our Shootout Winning early pressing was described this way:
Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the best pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment. “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments
And the three Psych tracks – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – are guaranteed to be dramatically more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard them.
But if you somehow ended up with a copy that has the wrong stampers, stampers similar to the ones you see below — on the original label mind you — none of those songs will have the audiophile qualities we describe.
And if you thought you were buying an original pressing of the album on the Yellow Atco label, well, that’s exactly what you were buying.
It’s not really your fault. The good pressings and the bad pressings all look the same. How were you to know your random purchase would only hint at the sound quality of the best pressings?
Blaming the record or the engineers who made it does nothing to fix the problem, although of course that’s the natural thing to do.
No, there is only one solution, one we have been putting to use for more than twenty years as we went about searching — and finding! — the best sounding records ever made.
Extracting all the Midrange Magic from a legendary album and Desert Island Disc like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile. Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc list? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.
And if the only way to find good-sounding clean copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records like this is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we will have to do.
It takes us years to find enough good clean copies to get a shootout going. You folks who don’t live in big cities with lots of used record stores are really out of luck when it comes to albums like these. We must look at twenty for every one we buy.
As I’m sure you know, it’s exceedingly difficult to find good sound for this band anywhere. Great copies of the second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, are out there and sound amazing, but we don’t have much luck finding them in clean condition.
Those are pretty darn hard to find, and quiet ones are even harder to find. There was a lot of bad mastering and bad vinyl going around when this record (and thousands just like it) were made. If you don’t believe us just pick up a few — for cheap, otherwise forget it — and see for yourself.
Further Reading