More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival
More Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival
This is a very old commentary describing a shootout we had done more than a decade ago. Some of what you see below would probably still be true. The cutting system used to make the AP pressing no doubt lacked Tubey Magic. It’s also true that many of the records mastered on it were as lifeless and boring as we describe.

The only way to be clear about what is going on with the audiophile pressings in this group is to do another shootout with them, and we just can’t see taking the time to do that when there are so many good vintage pressings we don’t have time to play as it is.
There are only so many hours in the day, why waste them playing this crap?
We do occasionally throw the modern remastered pressings we happen to have on hand into our shootouts when time permits. You can read all about the half-speeds we’ve reviewed here and some of the heavy vinyl pressings we’ve played here.
Our latest thinking about this Analogue Productions repress can be found here.
Now, on to our old shootout.
Years ago a customer sent me his copy of the Analogue Productions LP (mastered by Hoffman and Gray) in order to carry out a little shootout I had planned among the five copies I could pull together: two MoFi’s, the Fantasy ORC reissue, a blue label original, the AP, and another reissue.
Let’s just say there were no real winners, but there sure were some losers.
My take on the Hoffman version is simply this: it has virtually no trace of Tubey Analog Magic. None to speak of anyway.
It sounds like a clean, tonally correct but fairly bass-shy CD.
No pressing I played managed to be so tonally correct and so boring at the same time.
The MoFi has plenty of weird EQ colorations, the kind that bug the hell out of me on 98% of their crappy catalog, but at least it sounds like analog. It’s warm, rich and sweet.
The AP copy has none of those qualities.
More pointless 180 gram vinyl sound, to my ear anyway. I couldn’t sit through it with a gun to my head.
You would need a lot of vintage tubes in your system to get the AP record to sound right, and then every properly mastered record in your collection would sound worse.
The approach we recommend now?
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