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Before 2016 We Were Completely Wrong About Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

There are two areas in which we would like to amend some of the previous comments we’ve made about Deja Vu.

The first has to do with early pressings. Many years ago we wrote the following:

As we noted in previous commentary, the originals are uniformly awful. 

Although that’s mostly still true — Deja Vu is a very difficult album to find with good sound no matter what stampers you have. However, we now know that there are very good sounding copies — Shootout Winning copies in fact — with early stampers.

Deja Vu is in fact a title in which one stamper always wins, and that stamper can only be found on the early pressings.

Amazingly enough, there are more than 90 others (as of 2025) that we’ve discovered with one killer set of stampers that beat all comers as well. (There are surely many more hundreds that do, we just haven’t found them all yet. Please be patient; we are working on it.)

That’s area number one. Area number two is part of this old piece of advice:

If you bought the Classic Records pressing and you can’t tell what’s wrong with it, this may not be the right hobby for you. I highly recommend you buy the Joe Gastwirt mastered CD and either play it on your system or take it to a hi-fi store in your area. It’s tonally correct and undistorted. The Classic version is neither. Now when a stupid $15 CD is correct in a way that a $40 LP is not, something is very very wrong.

The part where we said this may not be the right hobby for you if you like Classic’s godawful remastering of Deja Vu is still true, depending on what exactly you’re trying to accomplish in the hobby.

If you’re not too picky about sound quality and just want to play new records, perhaps because old records are hard to find and often noisy, then fine, the Classic should get that job done for you.

We of course want nothing to do with it because we want exceptionally good sounding vinyl, and the Classic is definitely not very good sounding no matter how many nice things audiophile reviewers may have said about it.

No, the problem we see above is that we were recommending the currently available CD.

Yes, it’s mostly tonally correct and not distorted, but it has a bad a case of dead-as-a-doornail sound.

It’s as awful sounding as any remastered CD I have ever heard.

There is no top, there is no space, there is no life, there is no immediacy, there is no Tubey Magic — in short there is almost nothing left of what makes the best copies of Deja Vu so good.

We’ve known this for about five ten years, apologies for not getting around to correcting the record.

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The Domestic Stampers of 10cc’s Masterpiece Had Us Fooled for Years

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

I haven’t run into many audiophiles who own a copy of The Original Soundtrack, or any other 10cc album for that matter.

It’s the rare person who has the the kind of system that can play a recording with such explosive dynamics.

As I have an uncontrollable habit of saying, this is the kind of record that is guaranteed to bring any audiophile stereo to its knees. 

Since that is the case, and audiophiles who build the kind of big systems in heavily-treated custom rooms to meet the challenge such recordings present are thin on the ground — very thin it seems, as I am the only one I have ever known — it stands to reason that practically no audiophiles have ever experienced the size and power of the recording as it was meant to be heard.

I thought I was doing a very good job reproducing the sound of the album, but recent research has proved that, once again, I was mistaken. Previously I had written:

The recording itself is a tour de force, the main reason I’ve been demonstrating my stereo with it for more than thirty years. The extended suite that opens side one, One Night in Paris, has ambience, three-dimensional sound effects, and incredibly dynamic multi-tracked vocals at the climax that will leave you with your jaw on the floor.

All true. But I had been playing both domestic pressings and British pressings over the course of those thirty years, and I don’t remember clearly preferring one to the other.

With our latest shootout the British pulled away from the pack in a big way, with no British pressing being beaten by any domestic competitor.

The domestic pressings ranged from very good — 2+ on both sides — to passable at best — 1+ on both sides.

I honestly used to think they were close, that they would be hard to tell apart. Those days are gone. We are operating at a whole ‘nother level, and I am glad that we are. We want to give out only the most accurate information and sell only the best sounding records.  What I had thought was true ten years ago turns out to have been off the mark.

When reality turns out to be dramatically different from what you thought it was, and you can prove it — you actually have the physical records to back up your newer, more correct understanding — that’s audio progress.

You might try proving yourself wrong more often.

Most audiophiles I have run into like having their biases confirmed, but look where that has gotten some of them — stuck in a rut. Break out of that way of thinking and you may very well find that you have broken through to another level.

Because if you don’t go out of your way to prove yourself wrong, who will?

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Gorilla – A Soft Rock Favorite from 1975

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This is soft rock at its best, primarily made up of love songs, and helped immensely by the harmonically-gifted backing vocals of Graham Nash and David Crosby.

Rolling Stone notes that “With Gorilla, Taylor is well on his way to staking out new ground. What he’s hit upon is the unlikely mating of his familiar low-keyed, acoustic guitar-dominated style with L.A. harmony rock and the sweet, sexy school of rhythm and blues.”

If you are not a fan of the mellow James Taylor, this is not the album for you.

I happen to be just such a fan. Taylor’s sixth album contains consistently engaging, well-produced, well-written, memorable, singable (or hummable) songs that hold up to this day.

After enjoying it for more than 45 years I can honestly say now it actually sounds good. The recording finally makes sense, now that I have the stereo that can play it and the cleaning system that could get the record truly clean. And it only took 35 years — nice!

At Better Records that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about progress. Make no mistake, it is very REAL. When we take a recording that, on copy after copy, never sounded much better than passable, and actually get it to sound musical and involving, that’s not an illusion. It’s the result of the countless revolutions in audio that we’ve participated in. Without the hundreds of changes we’ve made to our stereo, room and cleaning systems, old records would just sound like old records.

The average copy is so flat, lifeless and hard sounding that you might just wonder if there isn’t something wrong with your stereo when the needle hits the Gorilla groove. Most copies are awful, and the same goes for the albums that came before it and after it, Walking Man and In the Pocket, respectively.

This record does not sound like just any old record, not the best copies anyway.

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Neil Young’s Guitar Masterpiece – Danger Bird

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Listen to the way Danger Bird (the second track on side one of  Zuma opens. Each instrument, one by one, slowly, deliberately, one could almost say haltingly, feeds into the mix, until the churning guitars give way to Neil’s spare vocal — fatalistic, doomed, already resigned to some fate he barely understands. 

Even though the song has just begun, you sense that Neil feels a weight and a darkness bearing down on him, that it’s ongoing, that it’s already started, that somehow you’re coming into it in the middle, well after the weight of it has begun to crush and perhaps even kill him. He knows the story of Danger Bird all too well.

It’s as powerful and intense a piece of music as any I have ever experienced; sublime in its simplicity, transcendental in effect. You feel yourself swept along, an out of body experience that you can’t control. When Neil launches into the first of many guitar solos the sense of journeying or exploring with him the imaginary musical world he is creating is palpable. He doesn’t seem to know where it will lead and neither do you. There is no structure to reassure you, no end in sight, only the succession of notes that play from moment to moment, first tensing, then relaxing; cresting, then falling away.

Music has the power to take you out of the world you know and place you in a world of its own making. How it can do that nobody knows. Whatever Neil tapped into to make that happen on Danger Bird, he succeeded completely.

If you’re in the right frame of mind, in the right environment, with everything working audio-wise, a minute into this song you will no longer be sitting in your comfy audio chair. You won’t know where you are, which is exactly where you should be.

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Our 2024 Shootout Winner of Mac’s Greatest Hits Was Amazing Sounding

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Fleetwood Mac Available Now

With a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a solid Double Plus (A++) side one, this vintage British import is doing practically everything right.

Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “big and tubey and weighty”…”lots of space and detail”…”sweet and breathy vox”…”jumping out of the speakers.”

Big, rich, energetic, with an abundance of analog Tubey Magic, this original Orange Label UK pressing has exactly the right sound for this music.

“Oh Well, Parts One and Two,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Man of the World,” and the surprise Number One single “Albatross” are all here and guaranteed to blow your mind.

Peter Green is hands down our favorite British Blues Guitarist of All Time – play this record and you will surely see why we feel that way.

This is a lot of money for a somewhat noisy copy, but the sound is so awesome and quiet pressings of the album so hard to come by that we hope someone will take a chance on it and get the thrill we did from hearing it sound right for once.

We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, this copy is guaranteed to blow your mind. Like all the best vintage British pressings, the sound is smooth, rich and full.

This is Old School ANALOG, baby. They don’t make ’em like this anymore because they don’t know how to.

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Eric Clapton’s First Album – A Personal Favorite from 1970

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

We had a killer pressing many years ago that sounded a whole lot better than I ever thought the album could sound.

Man, what a revelation to hear an old favorite sound so amazingly spacious and sweet.

As good as the best Atco pressings can be, the early British pressings simply capture more of the Eric Clapton magic than they do. They are dramatically less gritty. Richer and sweeter too. (We’ve included some moderately helpful title-specific advice down below.)

I’ve been playing this album since I bought it in 1970, the year it came out. During my high school years (1970-1972, my rather limited record collection was made up of albums by The Beatles, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, America, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Chicago, James Taylor, Spirit, The Band, Loggins and Messina, Peter Frampton, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Blind Faith, Bread, and no doubt more than a few others that are lost to time.

This was the music of my youth, and although many other artists and styles of music have been added to the playlist in the ensuing decades, classic rock still makes up a substantial portion of the music I play and enjoy today.

This is no doubt the case for many of you. It’s why Classic Rock is the heart and soul of our business. Finding quiet, exceptionally good sounding pressings of Classic Rock albums is probably the hardest thing we do around here. It’s what we devote most of our resources to, and if we can be indulged a self-compliment, it’s what we do best.

Of course, having no competition to speak of is no little help in this regard. No one is even attempting to conduct the kind of record shootouts we find ourselves immersed in all week long.

And who can blame them? It’s hard to put together the layers and layers of resources necessary to pull it off. There are a great many steps a record must go through before it finds itself for sale on our site, and that means there are ten copies sitting in the backroom for every one that’s available for purchase.

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Listening in Depth to Deceptive Bends

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

If you are interested in digging deeper, our listening in depth commentaries have extensive track by track breakdowns for some of the better-known albums we’ve done multiple shootouts for.

Side One

Good Morning Judge

There’s a wonderful guitar duel in this song, but notice how the guitar in the right channel is softer than the one in the left. It’s the same way on every copy we played, so it must be that way on the tape. The guitar in the left channel is louder so it wins.

The Things We Do for Love

A big hit for the band on both sides of the pond, and as such, there’s always a touch of radio EQ to the lead vocals on this track. If you have an suitably transparent copy you’ll be able to hear that the background vocals actually sound much more natural. They’re tonally correct, assuming your copy is right enough in the first place to let you hear it.

Marriage Bureau Rendezvous

This track has wonderful Tubey Magical Tillermanesque guitars. They sound out of this world on a copy with the kind of clarity and sweetness found on the best pressings.

People in Love
Modern Man Blues

Side Two

Honeymoon With B Troop

Amazing DEMO DISC SOUND on the best copies! Some of the punchiest sound we have ever heard, bar none.

I Bought a Flat Guitar Tutor

This track has a richer, more relaxed sound than most of the rest of the album. The sparse instrumentation allows the various elements more room to breathe. On a Hot Stamper copy even the whistling will sound full-bodied.

This is Analog Magic at its best. The sound is effortless, completely natural, and totally free from any hint of hi-fi-ishness. Not one out of a hundred rock records has a track this well recorded.

As long as it’s not too bright. If it is it will spit like crazy.

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Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti – A Personal Favorite from 1985

If you’re a fan of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe, Joe Jackson and a few other lesser-knowns from this era, Squeeze is the band for you. I put them right up there with Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel in the pantheon of Best British Pop Music Bands of All Time.

Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti has long been a favorite album of mine, a Desert Island Disc if you will, with some of the most powerfully produced, intelligently written and passionately performed songs in the entire Squeeze canon.

There’s plenty of Tubey Magical richness and smoothness on the best British pressings — such as this one — qualities the domestic pressings are sorely lacking, having been mastered from dub tapes. If you want to hear this music right on vinyl, it’s British or nothing, and with one of our Hot Stamper pressings it’s British and everything — everything that’s good about this recording is captured on these sides.

What to Listen For

The overall sound needs to be rich and tubey, not dry, thin or modern.

Clarity and space are nice but not if they come at the expense of the smooth, rich, natural sound of tubes (whether there are tubes in the chain or not).

For more What to Listen For advice on other titles we have auditioned, please click here.

This record sounds best to us this way:

For more modestly helpful title-specific advice, click here.

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Extracting the Midrange Magic of Buffalo Springfield Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

So many copies of this album sound so bad and play so poorly that most audiophiles have given up by now and written it off as a lost cause.

But we didn’t. We kept at it. Our main motivation? The music.

Extracting the midrange magic from a album 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 copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records such as this one is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.

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Listening in Depth to Retrospective

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series, with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Retrospective.

Here are some albums on our site you can buy with similar track by track breakdowns.

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.

We’ve never heard a copy of this album that truly qualifies as a Demo Disc, but some of the songs can sound superb — Kind Woman and I Am A Child come immediately to mind. The recording, like so many from the ’60s, may not be perfect, but it’s so full of midrange magic, ambience and sweetness that the musical values of the recording are communicated effortlessly and completely — assuming you have a good copy.

Side One

For What It’s Worth

Almost all copies have surface noise issues at the start of this song.

Mr. Soul

The aggressive quality of the screaming crowd at the beginning of this track is a dead giveaway of the poor sound found on most pressings. When the screaming is clean, undistorted and extends well up high, you have a contender. Add bass, some tubey magic to the midrange, and then you can call it a Hot Stamper.

How hot is another question entirely, but if you get this far, you are definitely in the majors. The typical pressing of this album is strictly bush league.

Sit Down, I Think I Love You

On the best copies the tape hiss is clearly audible and tonally correct; this is the first thing you will notice if you have a Hot Stamper.

The second thing is how much the guitars “ring.”

On the higher rez copies the guitars have some of the loveliest tone you can find on any Springfield album.

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