Top Artists – Creedence Clearwater Revival

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bayou Country

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

  • A Bayou Country like you’ve never heard, with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it on both sides
  • “Proud Mary” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” are two of the better sounding tracks found on the album, and you can be sure this amazing side two has them swamp rockin’ like crazy
  • Our pick for the best sounding CCR record – but only if you have a copy with sonics like these
  • 4 1/2 stars: “All the songs add up to a superb statement of purpose, a record that captures Creedence Clearwater Revival’s muscular, spare, deceptively simple sound as an evocative portrait of America.”
  • This is arguably CCR’s best sounding album. Roughly 150 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist or group can be found here.
  • 4 1/2 stars: “All the songs add up to a superb statement of purpose, a record that captures Creedence Clearwater Revival’s muscular, spare, deceptively simple sound as an evocative portrait of America.”

The sound is big and open with real weight to the bottom. The top end has a much more natural extension than most, and much less of the harshly brightened-up upper midrange you might be familiar with. On side two you can even pick out the piano in “Good Golly Miss Molly,” which is barely audible on most pressings.

(more…)

Music Is Always More Important than Sound

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

You can find Demo Disc quality records all over the site, but what if you are not interested in demonstrating your equipment and just want to play the music you love?

And what if the music you love wasn’t recorded all that well?

What if the music you love is on the third Band album, Stage Fright, a notoriously problematical recording?

You buy the best sounding version you can find and put up with the sonic limitations because the music is always more important than the sound.

(My wife toured with the band Asia in Europe one year, a tour to celebrate their Number One debut album. It happens to be one of the worst sounding records I have ever played, but that didn’t stop people from loving the music. Why would it?)

A better example than Stage Fright are the albums released by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Good recordings, not great ones, nothing like Demo Discs, just some of the greatest roots rock music ever made. Their first six albums probably belong in any collection of pop and rock. (Number seven, not so much.)

It’s how Washington Post writer Geoff Edgers first learned for himself that our records are the real deal.

We sent him one of their albums, a second rate copy with one good side, and according to him it’s still the best sounding CCR record he’s ever heard. I told him he should play the AP pressing and he said “Why bother?” He’s heard enough of their records to know what to expect, and it sure isn’t better sound.

And, because I can’t resist, allow me to point out that the Heavy Vinyl pressings those AP guys made were really something, and by really something, I mean really bad. After playing the Heavy Vinyl (and the MoFi), I had only one question: why would anyone want to take all the fun out of CCR’s music?

Still waiting for an answer to that one.

(more…)

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Green River

More Creedence Clearwater Revival

  • Amazing sound throughout this early Fantasy pressing of CCR’s Roots Rock classic, with both sides earning INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Plus (A+++) grades
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this incredible copy in our notes: “big and tubey and 3D”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”huge and rich and open”…”great energy and weight”…”crazy bass and snare”…”massive and tubey”
  • An essential Must Own for every Classic Rock collection, this LP includes some of the band’s biggest hits: “Green River” and “Bad Moon Rising,” “Lodi,” “Wrote a Song for Everyone,” and plenty more
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs, but once you hear how incredible sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting stitches and just be swept away by the music
  • 5 stars: “If anything, CCR’s third album Green River represents the full flower of their classic sound initially essayed on its predecessor, Bayou Country. One of the differences between the two albums is that Green River is tighter, with none of the five-minute-plus jams that filled out both their debut and Bayou Country, but the true key to its success is a peak in John Fogerty’s creativity.”

(more…)

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Self-Titled

More Creedence Clearwater Revival

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, this copy of the band’s debut album will be very hard to beat
  • These sides are amazingly low-distortion, solid, dynamic, with the neutral tonality completely missing from the vast majority of reissues
  • Featuring classics such as “I Put a Spell on You,” the extended-length jam “Susie Q” (8:34, perfect for Underground Radio), “The Working Man,” “Porterville,” and more
  • 4 stars: “CCR’s self-titled debut album was gloriously out-of-step with the times, teeming with John Fogerty’s Americana fascinations. … the band’s sound is vibrant, with gutsy arrangements that borrow equally from Sun, Stax, and the swamp.”

It’s unlikely you will be demonstrating your system with this record, but you may find yourself enjoying the hell out of it for what it is — an early example of Roots Rock that still holds up today.

This is an album that’s nearly impossible to find with excellent sound and clean surfaces. This is one of the best copies we’ve managed to come across. (more…)

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Mardi Gras

More Creedence Clearwater Revival

More Roots Rock

  • CCR’s final studio album appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with superb Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides of this original Fantasy pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • We shot out a number of copies and this one had the midrange presence, bass, and dynamics that were missing from most others we played
  • Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live
  • “Recorded after the departure of guitarist Tom Fogerty, it was the band’s only studio album as a trio, and featured songs written, sung, and produced by each of the remaining members [Stu Cook and Doug Clifford], rather than just John Fogerty” – Wikipedia

(more…)

Guilty as Charged: We Used to Blame CCR’s Records for the Bad Sound We Heard Too

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now

Another entry that falls under the heading of

What’s the big idea?

Before 2008 or so we had regularly been frustrated with this band’s recordings. There were plenty of  customers for their albums, but even our best Hot Stampers fell well short of the standards we set for top quality sound.

We assumed the recordings themselves were at fault.

Things started to turn around after that, judging from this bit of boilerplate at the bottom of a listing for Green River from around 2010 or so:

Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these.

The best copies no longer to seem to have the problems we used to hear all the time.

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard the congestion and grittiness in the recording is that two things changed. (1) We found better copies of the record to play — probably, can’t say for sure, but let’s assume we did — and (2) we’ve made lots of improvements to the stereo since the last time we did the shootout.

You have to get around to doing regular shootouts for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they might comprise or when they might have occurred, were incontrovertible. The album was now playing at a much, much higher level.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of taking full advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last ten or twenty years. [Make that thirty by now.]

Live and Learn

When Creedence’s records started to sound good, we stopped blaming those albums for being badly recorded.

It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad — or least problematical — now sound pretty darn good. 

Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change. Our ability — and yours — to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what Hot Stampers are all about.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “…it was like there was a blanket taken off the speakers.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

Just some comments on the records purchased in July. Some of these records were a night and day experience for me. [For more tales of night and day experiences, we refer to them as “revelations,” please click here.]

I bought ten years after a space in time and nilsson son of shmilsson from the columbia record club back in the early seventies. I’ve taken good care of them and thought they sounded very good so I didn’t need to upgrade. You mentioned that we’ve never heard these records sound like this, so I thought I’d take a chance.

WOW! Space in time, son of schmillson, eat a peach, it was like there was a blanket taken off the speakers. Everything sounded sooo much better, more involving, the sound jumped out at me. And not that in-your-face shrill “run for the volume control” sound which was so prevalent in the late 80’s and into the 90’s. 

CCR cosmo’s factory, I’ve got an original mofi copy which sounded really good (I must have lucked out, 90% of the mofi’s I bought didn’t have a problem with sibilance. The ones that did have that problem and the dead as a doorknob presentation — anadisc 200 — are all gone.)

The super hot stamper of Cosmos factory on side 1 completely smoked the mofi, side 2 they were comparable. The super hot stamper had more depth to it. You could hear into the recording, making the experience more lifelike.

Thanks, Shane

Shane,

Thanks for writing. We love to hear from our satisfied customers!

Comparing the sound of the pressings you owned — including audiophile LPs in this case — versus the Hot Stamper pressings we sent you will allow you to recognize some fairly consistent differences. We’ve listed them below for handy reference and further study.

We hope these links will help you avoid other records with these same problems. As a general rule, the average pressing — of any kind — will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the Hot Stamper pressings we offer:

(more…)

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Willy and the Poor Boys

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

More Rock Classics

  • Both sides of this early pressing were giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the awful Heavy Vinyl remasters of CCR’s albums that Acoustic Sounds commissioned – they are so wrong they should make your head ache
  • Features “Down On The Corner,” “Fortunate Son,” “Midnight Special,” and more, and we guarantee you’ve never heard them sound as good as they do on this vintage copy
  • 5 stars: “…a fun record, perhaps the breeziest album CCR ever made. Fogerty’s rage remains, blazing to the forefront on “Fortunate Son,” a working-class protest song that cuts harder than any of the explicit Vietnam protest songs of the era, one of the reasons that it hasn’t aged where its peers have. Also, there’s that unbridled vocal from Fogerty and the ferocious playing on CCR…”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1969, one that deserves a place in any audiophile collection’s pop and rock section, especially for fans of roots rock

The Virtues of Shootouts

The story of our recent shootout is what real progress in audio is all about.

Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these. The best copies no longer to seem to have the problems we used to hear all the time.

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard the congestion and grittiness in the recording is that two things changed. One, we found better copies of the record to play — probably, can’t say for sure, but let’s assume we did, and, Two, we’ve made lots of improvements to the stereo since the last time we did the shootout.

(more…)

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Pendulum

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

  • Bigger and bolder, with more bass, more energy, and more of that “you-are-there-immediacy” of ANALOG that set the best vintage pressings apart from reissues, CDs, and whatever else you care to name
  • Those of you who are familiar with this record will not be surprised to learn that these shootouts are TOUGH – very few copies are any better than mediocre
  • 4 stars: “John Fogerty spent time polishing the production, bringing in keyboards, horns, even a vocal choir. His songs became self-consciously serious and tighter, working with the aesthetic of the rock underground — Pendulum was constructed as a proper album, contrasting dramatically with CCR’s previous records, all throwbacks to joyous early rock records where covers sat nicely next to hits and overlooked gems tucked away at the end of the second side.”

This copy will surely beat any pressing you put it up against. This will be especially true if you put it up against the Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl from years back, which will sound thick, opaque, airless and congested next to a properly mastered Fantasy pressing (deep groove or otherwise) such as this one. (more…)

A Cosmo’s Factory Shootout from Way Back When

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now

UPDATE 2020

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 manage to get hold of 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 that I can find 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.

(more…)