Top Artists – David Crosby

Crosby, Stills and Nash – Daylight Again

Hot Stampers of Crosby, Stills and Nash

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  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER on both sides, this vintage copy will be very hard to beat
  • This is the embodiment of the Classic CSN sound we love – rich, full-bodied, warm, punchy, dynamic and clear 
  • Stephen Barncard, one of our favorite recording engineers, no doubt deserves most of the credit
  • Allmusic on Wasted on the Way and Southern Cross: “Both were extracted as singles and became among the best-known tracks not only on Daylight Again, but also in the post-’60s CSN canon.”

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – CSN

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  • This copy of CS&N’s “comeback” album boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a superb Double Plus (A++) side two
  • The sound is big and relatively rich, the vocals breathy and immediate, and you will not believe all the space and ambience – which of course are all qualities that Heavy Vinyl records have far too little of, and the main reason we have lost all respect for the bulk of them
  • Includes CS&N classics “Dark Star,” “Just A Song Before I Go,” and “Fair Game”
  • 4 stars: “It has held up remarkably well, both as a memento of its time, and as a thoroughly enjoyable musical work.”

Most copies of CSN are unbelievably flat, harsh, thin and opaque, which means simply that our approach is the only one that offers any hope of success in finding good sound on this album.

With a large enough batch of copies, cleaned using the best fluids, on the best machines, it is possible to find two sides this good. Without a pretty big batch of well-cleaned pressings, your chance of success is hardly worth calculating. Even with the best intentions, frustration is likely to set in long before a Hot Stamper has much chance of being found.

Most copies have a tendency to sound dry, so look for one that’s rich and full-bodied. Most copies are opaque and flat so look for those with transparency and ambience. Most copies are lean down low and dull up top; try to find the ones with bass and real top-end extension.

And of course you need to find a copy that gets the voices right. CS&N’s albums live or die by the quality of their vocals, a subject we have discussed on the site at length.

You think the first CS&N album has problems in the sound department? Of course it does; in 1969 lots of rock records had recording problems. But CSN was released in 1977. By 1977, there were scores of talented rock engineers producing top quality multi-track recordings. Our Top 100 is full of their best work.

One would have thought that CS&N, the ultimate perfectionists (according to their press accounts), would have hired the best and sweated out every detail in the studio in order to produce a recording the equal of Rumours or The Cars debut (even if the songs themselves, to be honest, weren’t quite the equal of their earlier work).

Alas, CS&N chose the Albert brothers, whose most famous album is Layla. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Laylas — we’ve done the shootout many times — and of course, there are better and worse CSNs.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side, some songs have the breath of life and some don’t. That’s a recording problem. It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like “Shadow Captain” and “Dark Star,” among others.

But “Just a Song Before I Go” on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best do well and the rest do poorly and grade accordingly, on the curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got.

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Letter of the Week – “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

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

Hey Tom, 

Tom, I just listened to the White Hot Stamper (A+++) CSNY album.

Amazing. I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound. Worth every penny.

The sound at low volume is amazing. The sound at high volume is spectacular.

The clarity, the depth, the sound stage are very rich and alive with color and presence.

Thank you! I am now going to investigate your piece on the cleaning process.

Rocco

Rocco,

Glad you liked this copy as much as we did! It is a very special album and one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — that first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself — 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 first 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.

My Record Collecting World

Anticipating the release of the next new Half-Speed remastered pressing that would deliver me from the evil of the garden-variety random domestic or import LP I happened to own was the dominant feature of my record collecting world in the 70s and 80s.

No one reading this blog will be surprised to learn that almost none of those “new and improved” pressings would go on to pass the test of time. This is an idea I first came to appreciate in the 90s and one that has become more true with each passing year.

With the increasing proliferation of one Heavy Vinyl mediocrity after another, in 2007 we finally recognized we had a duty to our customers to take a stand athwart history and yell “Stop.”

If I were to own a collection of records today, it would have exactly one Mobile Fidelity record in it, John Klemmer’s Touch. It’s the only one we have never been able to beat with a non-audiophile pressing, and believe me, we’ve tried. I love  the album and would be proud to find a place for it on my desert island.

The rest of the Mobile Fidelity pressings we’ve auditioned mostly suck, especially the new ones. You can find our reviews and commentaries, all 119 of them, here. When they’re good, or even decent, we say so.

When they’re as awful as they often are, we put them in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame and say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Best, TP

Rocco wrote us this letter early on in his Hot Stamper journey, which we replied to at length if you wish to check it out.

More Deja Vu Letters!

“I know in one sense you’re only doing your job but who the hell else does what you do?”
“I almost fell off my listening chair.”
“I think It’s a bargain at $800. It absolutely trashes my Mofi version…”
“For the next three hours, I spun disc after disc, to their delight.”

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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – So Far

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  • With two incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this copy is practically as good as we’ve ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • The two tracks exclusive to this album, “Ohio” and “Find the Cost of Freedom,” are amazingly well recorded – both have Demo Disc quality sound on this killer side one
  • Huge, rich and energetic, this pressing brings the gorgeous harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to life like nothing you have ever heard
  • We don’t imagine we’ll be tracking down too many copies that sound this good and play this quiet so if you’re a fan, scoop this one up!
  • If you’ve made the mistake of buying any Heavy Vinyl pressing containing any of these songs, this record will show you just exactly what you’ve been missing

When you get hold of a pressing as good as this one, the sound is so correct it makes a mockery of the phony EQ and just plain bad mastering and pressing of the Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered versions.

The MoFi and the Classic 200g LP of Deja Vu are both clearly wrong in important ways. This record will make it clear exactly what’s wrong with them, assuming you have the critical listening skills to recognize the differences. If you are on this site, chances are very good you do.

Once you hear this copy you will never be able to enjoy those audiophile pressings again, of that we are quite confident. (more…)

Crosby / Nash – Whistling Down The Wire

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  • You’ll find incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound throughout this vintage pressing – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • These sides were noticeably richer than practically all others we played, which generally tended to be lean and dry
  • We played a big pile of these, but finding the Tubey Magical, spacious, sweet analog sound we were after was not easy
  • Fortunately this copy showed us that it indeed was possible to get the clear, breathy vocals necessary to bring out the wonderful harmonies these two are so rightly famous for
  • If you’re a fan of hippie folk rock, this title from 1976 is surely a Must Own
  • The complete list of titles from 1976 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here

As a budding audiophile, I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the ’70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was then using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists like them, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.

And here I am — here we are — still at it, fifty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.

That kind of progress is proof that we’re doing it right. It’s a good test for any audiophile. If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year. As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some will be revealed, but for the most part, vintage pressings should sound better each time you play them with continual refinements and improvements to your system, room and cleaning techniques.

That’s what makes it fun to play old records: They just keep getting better.

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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young / 4 Way Street

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  • A 4 Way Street like you’ve never heard, with roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on all FOUR sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner (side three actually won the shootout)
  • This live album gives you the “naked” sound of the real thing – the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that could never happen again
  • Bill Halverson worked his magic, but only the better pressings let his genius shine the way it does here
  • 4 1/2 stars: “4 Way Street, released in April of 1971: a live double-LP set, chock-full of superb music distilled down from a bunch of nights on that tour that more than fulfilled the promise of the group.”
  • Rolling Stone raves that “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are all performers of unquestionable talent, and mostly because they stay out of each others’ way, 4 Way Street must surely be their best album to date.”

If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this copy will let you do it. It’s not easy to find good sound on even one side of this album, let alone all four!

The Naked Sound of Live Music

The song “Triad,” just to cite one example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and his acoustic guitar. It’s as real sounding as anything I’ve ever heard from the band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded compared to what the microphones must have picked up.

This live album gives you the “naked” sound of the real thing — the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that would never happen again. (Later CSN albums are mostly dreadful. Fortunately, later Neil Young albums, e.g., Zuma, are often Demo Discs of the highest quality.)

Side two, our favorite of the four, gives you authentically Live Neil Young from 1970; no other live Neil Young record contained material from this era until the recently released Live at Massey Hall album (1971), which is superb and belongs in your collection on CD. (I admit to not having heard the vinyl.)

What To Watch Out For

If the singers get hard and shrill in the louder passages, then what you have is a pretty typical pressing. Add grit and grain, smeared transients, opacity, surface noise and a lack of weight down low and you’ll know why it takes us years to find enough copies to shoot out — because this is what most pressings sound like.

As you have surely read on the site by now, this band has put out more bad pressings of good recordings than any I can think of. Here is an excerpt from our review of their first album that discusses the issue in more depth.

95% of all the pressings of this album I’ve ever played have been disappointing. They’re almost always wrong, each in their own way of course. Some are dull, some are shrill, some are aggressive, some have no bass — every mastering fault you can imagine can be heard on one copy or another of this record. The bottom line? If you want to buy them and try them from your local record store, plan on spending hundreds of dollars and putting in years of frustrating effort, perhaps with little to show for it in the end. This is one tough nut to crack; it’s best to know that going in. (more…)

Listening in Depth to Deja Vu

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

DEJA VU is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it. It’s yet another in the long list of rock and pop recordings that really come alive on big speakers at loud levels .

One obvious reason that our turn up your volume makes for such a great test is that the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Deja Vu. Here are some albums on our site you can buy with similar track by track breakdowns.

Side One

Carry On

This song is a great test for the quality of the vocals. If you can get through the first part of the song with little to no strain in the voices, you’re on the right track.

The bass on this track always lacks a measure of definition, but you’ll know by track three if your bass is solid enough to set the foundation this music requires to really get going. Carry On has a huge number of overdubs, so it will never have very high-resolution, but on a Hot Stamper copy like this one it can sound wonderful.

Teach Your Children 
Almost Cut My Hair

One of the key test tracks we use for side one, this is the only time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young actually sounds like a rock and roll band. According to Stephen Barncard this was recorded live in the studio. It sure sounds like it. The amount of energy the band generates on this track exceeds all the energy of the first album put together.

The reason this track presents such a tough test is that it has to be mastered perfectly in order to make you want to turn it up as loud as your stereo will play. This song is not for sipping wine and smoking cigars. It positively cries out to be played at serious volume levels on monstrously large speakers. Nothing else will do justice to the power of the band’s one and only live performance.

Listen to Neil in the left channel wailing away like a man possessed. Imagine what his grunged out guitar would sound like coming out of a stack of Marshall amps the size of Chicago. Now hold that sound in your head as you turn up the volume on your preamp. When your system starts to distort like crazy, back it off a notch and have a seat.

Helpless
Woodstock

Side Two

Déjà Vu

When you get a good copy of this album, this song sounds so rich and tubey magical you’d swear it couldn’t get any better. Huge amounts of deep bass. Acoustic guitars that ring for days. Midrange magic to die for. Unfortunately so few copies sound this way that most audiophiles have no concept of what this track really can do.

If I could indulge in some more MoFi and Half-Speed bashing for a moment, the bass “solo” at the end of this song is a great test for bass definition. The notes are relatively high, and it’s easy for them to sound blurred and wooly. The MoFi, like virtually all Half-Speed mastered records, has a problem with bass definition. If you own the MoFi, listen for how clearly defined the notes are at the end of this track. Then play any other copy, either of So Far or Deja Vu. It’s a pretty safe bet that the bass will be much more articulate. I know how bad the MoFi is in this respect. Rarely do “normal” records have bass that bad.

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The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Almost Cut My Hair

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

The only time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young actually sound like a real rock and roll band is on the track Almost Cut My Hair. According to Stephen Barncard, one of the engineers on Deja Vu, the track was actually recorded live in the studio.

Boy, it sure sounds like it. The amount of energy the band generates on this one song exceeds the energy of the entire first album put together. 

The reason this song presents such a tough test is that it has to be mastered properly in order to make you want to turn it up, not just louder, but as loud as your stereo will play.

This song is not to be used as background music whilst sipping wine and smoking cigars.

It positively cries out to be played at serious volume levels on monstrously large speakers. Nothing else will do justice to the power of the band’s one and only live performance captured on the album.

Listen to Neil in the left channel wailing away like a man possessed. Imagine what his grunged-out guitar would sound like blasting out of a stack of Marshall amps the size of a house.

Now hold that sound in your head as you turn up the volume on your preamp.

When your system starts to distort, back it off a notch and take your seat.

Deja Vu Letters

Some of our customers have written to tell us about the amazing sound they heard on our Hot Stamper pressings of Deja Vu.

“I know in one sense you’re only doing your job but who the hell else does what you do?”
“I almost fell off my listening chair.”
“I think It’s a bargain at $800. It absolutely trashes my Mofi version…”
“I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Deja Vu

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

  • A vintage import copy of CSNY’s magnum opus from 1970 with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • Side two is reasonably quiet, but side one has two bad marks, one on “Teach Your Children” and another one on “Helpless,” so if those are your favorite tracks, this is probably not the copy for you
  • The sound is huge – lively, present and rich in a way that nothing you’ve heard can compete with
  • And that’s especially true if you own any audiophile pressing of any kind – none of the ones we’ve heard can begin to compete with the real thing we are offering here
  • One of our all-time favorite albums at Better Records and one that almost never sounds this good (unless you know exactly which stampers to buy, of course)
  • We find ten to fifteen RL Zep II’s for every Déjà Vu with the right stampers – we’ve only done two shootouts since 2020, if that tells you anything
  • 5 stars: “…this variety made Déjà Vu a rich musical banquet for the most serious and personal listeners, while mass audiences reveled in the glorious harmonies and the thundering electric guitars…”

If you play this copy at serious levels and have the kind of full range system that’s both loud and clean like live music, we guarantee you will be nothing less than gobsmacked at the size and power of the music on this album, the band’s inarguable masterpiece.

Both sides here are super high-resolution, tonally perfect, Tubey Magical and ALIVE. The vocals are silky and sweet with very little strain or grain (a very common problem in the loudest choruses). The highs are extended, the bass is deep and punchy, and the overall clarity is breathtaking.

Just listen to the guitars during the solos — you can really hear the sound of the pick hitting the strings. The rhythm guitars sound meaty and chunky like the best sounding copies of Zuma and After The Gold Rush. (more…)

Crosby Stills & Nash – Critical Listening Exercise

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

This very old commentary from an early Hot Stamper listing (2005?) for CSN’s debut makes note of some specific qualities in the recording that are a good test for midrange transparency and naturalness.

Here are some other albums with specific advice on what you should be listening for.

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash (& Young)? 

Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with bad midrange — like most of them — is a worthless record.

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Listen to the section of the song that starts with Stills’ line “Can I tell it like it is,” with Nash and Crosby behind him — it’s clearly a generation of tape down from what came before and what comes after. The voices and the acoustic guitars just seem to lose their immediacy and transient impact for no apparent reason. Wha’ happen?

It’s the mix, folks, and no mastering engineer can fix it. This album is full of parts and pieces of various songs that are occasionally problematical in that way. Recognize them for what they are, little bumps in the road, a road that led ultimately to one of the greatest pop albums ever made.

On the hot copies the best sounding material will sound amazing, and the lesser sounding material (i.e., the more poorly recorded or mixed bits and pieces) will sound as good as they can sound.

That’s the nature of the beast. It is what it is. The more intensely you listen to a record like this — a true Rock Classic from the 60s, and one we listen to very intensely when doing these shootouts — the more you will notice these kinds of recording artifacts. It’s what gives them “character.”

It’s also what allows you to play a record like this on a regular basis and still find something new in it after all these years.

We’ve made some recent improvements to the stereo and room here at Better Records and I can tell you I heard things in this recording I never knew were there.

What could be more fun than that? The music never gets old, and neither does the sound.

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