Top Artists – Graham Nash

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes – Critical Listening Exercise

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

UPDATE 2026

To see more records that have one or two tracks of special interest to audiophiles, including this very album, please click here.

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 hundreds other titles with specific advice on what to listen for on some of the albums we’ve played in shootouts.

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. I suppose you could say it’s what gives them “character.”

It’s also what allows you to play a record like this over and over again and still find something new in the sound 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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A Tale of Two MoFi Deja Vu’s

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

UPDATE 2026

A commentary from a long time ago about two different MoFi pressings of the same title, Deja Vu. We stopped playing Mobile Fidelity records like this a long time ago and the only ones we play these days are ones that are sent to us for free from customers or friends. Mobile Fidelity made some good records back in the old days. As I wrote not long ago, I owe them a debt of gratitude.

But the records we’ve auditioned that they’ve been making more recently had me asking: How is this company still in business?

Sonic Grade: F (or not!)

Just for fun about 10 years ago [make that 20] I pulled out a MoFi pressing of Deja Vu I had laying around. I hadn’t played their version in a long time. I could have gone a lot longer without playing it, because what I heard was pretty disappointing. Playing their record confirmed all my prejudices. The highs sizzled and spit. The heart of the midrange was recessed and sour.

Know what it reminded me of? A bad Japanese pressing.

(Since most of them are pretty bad I could have just said a typical Japanese pressing, but that’s another story for another day.)

And if that’s not bad enough, the bass definition disappeared. Bass notes and bass parts that were clearly audible and easily followed on our Hot Stamper copies were murky, ill-defined mud on the MoFi.

If you own the MoFi you owe it to yourself to hear a better sounding version. You really don’t know what you’re missing.

But Then, A Few Years Later We Played This Copy…

Here is what we had to say at the time:

Hot Stamper Sound on the MoFi pressing of Deja Vu, can it be possible? I have NEVER heard the MoFi sound this good, not even close. This just KILLS the other copies I’ve heard. I wrote a scathing review of their badly mastered pressing which you can read below, and I still stand behind every word, because this copy is not your average MoFi. The average one still sucks. What we are selling here is a FLUKE. Here is the story from our Hot Stamper shootout we just did.

This week we picked up a very clean looking MoFi pressing and decided to throw it in the shootout just for fun. We were shocked — this one actually sounded good! Not as amazing as our best Hot Stampers, but much better than we had expected. We checked our old copy and heard the same bad sound described above. 

Pressing variations exist for audiophile records as well, and here was another example. It just goes to show that nothing short of playing a record will tell you how it sounds — except for reading our website. Who besides us could spend so much time playing so many bad records? It’s a dirty job, but we’re happy to do it. Hearing one amazing record makes up for playing 10 bad ones, so we’ll keep at it.

Keep in mind that the only way you can never be wrong about your records is to simply avoid playing them. If you have better equipment than you did, say, five or ten years ago, try playing some of your MoFi’s, 180 gram LPs, Japanese pressings, 45 RPM remasters and the like. You might be in for quite a shock.

It’s all good — until the needle hits the groove. Then you might find yourself in need of actual Better Records, not the ones you just hoped were better.

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Listening in Depth to Replay

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We stopped doing shootouts for this album many years ago after running into too many mediocre-at-best if not downright awful sounding copies. These notes are from about ten years ago.

Replay is a very handy record for setting your VTA. The end of Shadow Captain has loud vocals and punchy bass, which are a bit difficult to reproduce. (Forget trying to get this song to sound good if you don’t have an exceptionally good copy.) 

The next song is To The Last Whale, which starts with Nash and Crosby’s multitracked voices in a big hall. With the correct VTA, their voices should sound silky and sweet. If your arm is too far down in the back, they will get a bit dull. Too high, and they will lose that breathy, “fluffy” quality.

And once you get their voices to sound just right, make sure the ending of Shadow Captain is still punchy and dynamic.

Side One

Carry On 

A crappy remix, with added guitar, ugh. (more…)

The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Almost Cut My Hair

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) 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 threatens to exceed the energy of the entire first album put together. (Not really. The energy on 49 Bye-Byes, the last track on side two and my favorite on the album is off the charts and shows just how powerful there brand of Hippie Folk Rock could be given the right material. I defy anyone to name two albums from the period released back to back that are better. They have their equals, don’t get me wrong, but the idea of there being a pair of “betters” is a hard one to entertain once the pot smoke clears.)

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.

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Listening in Depth to Crosby Stills & Nash

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now

Now with bonus CD Advice.

Although millions of copies of CSN’s first album were sold, so few were mastered and pressed well, and so many mastered and pressed poorly, that only a ridiculously small number of Hot Stamper copies have ever actually made it to the site. A couple dozen would be my guess, compared to, for example, the Beatles albums, many of which have sold by the hundreds. To this day they are difficult to keep in stock, I assume because our customers seem to really like them.)

We wish that were not the case — we love the album — but the copies we know to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound are just not sitting around in the record bins waiting for us to scoop them up.

But of course that was never the really the case even back in the good old days, as the reissue we like was simply not produced in significantly large numbers the way the originals were. Finding the right reissues was always a matter of luck, with the odds stacked very much against us. I don’t remember ever finding more than one copy with the killer stampers in a single year.

Warning

Whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Joe Gastwirt-mastered CD.

It couldn’t be any more awful. (His Deja Vu is just as bad.)

In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

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 substandard midrange reproduction — like most of them — is a worthless record.

(more…)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Deja Vu

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

  • Boasting two solid Double Plus (A++) sides or close to them, this early pressing of CSNY’s magnum opus is doing just about everything right
  • The sound is huge throughout – lively, present and rich in a way that nothing you’ve heard can compete with (particularly on side two)
  • 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 three 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…)

Listening in Depth to Songs for Beginners

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash 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 Song for Beginners.

(Here are some other albums currently on our site with similar track by track breakdowns.)

This is one helluva well recorded album. Most of the credit must go to the team of recording engineers, led here by the esteemed Bill Halverson, the man behind all of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young albums. Nash was clearly influenced by his work with his gifted bandmates, proving with this album that he can hold his own with the best of the best.

Some songs (We Can Change The World, Be Yourself) are grandly scaled productions with the kind of studio polish that would make Supertramp envious. For me, a big speaker guy with a penchant for giving the old volume knob an extra click or two, it just doesn’t get any better.

Others (Sleep Song, Wounded Bird) are quiet and intimate. Their subtlely is highlighted by the big productions surrounding them. This is that rare album in which every aspect of the production, from the arrangements to the final mix, serves to bring out the best qualities in the songs, regardless of scale.

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Graham Nash’s Wild Tales and Their Mysteries Many and Deep

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

What hurts so many pressings of this album is a generally lifeless quality and a lack of presence in the midrange.

Were the stampers a bit worn for those copies, or no good to start with, or was it bad vinyl that couldn’t hold the energy of the stamper, or perhaps some stampers just weren’t cut right?

Maybe it’s something as simple as the pressing plates going out of alignment at some point in the cycle?

Don’t ask us. We sure don’t know. And one thing we’ve learned over the years is not to pretend to.

These are record mysteries, and they are mysteries that will always be mysteries, if for no other reason than the number of production variables hopelessly intertwined at the moment of a pressing’s creation can never be teased apart no matter how smart you are.

As we never tire of saying, thinking is really not much help with regard to finding better sounding records.

Not surprisingly, we’ve found that cleaning and playing them seems to work fairly well.

Those two things work fairly well because nothing else works at all.

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – Daylight Again

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

  • With excellent Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides, this vintage copy is doing just about everything right
  • This is the embodiment of the classic CSN sound we love – rich, full-bodied, warm, punchy, dynamic and clear
  • Steven 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, Nash & Young / 4 Way Street

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

  • These early Atlantic pressings boast roughly Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades or close to them on all FOUR sides, just shy of our Shootout Winner (side four actually won the shootout) – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • 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
  • Bill Halverson worked his magic, but only the better pressings let his genius shine the way it does here
  • This is a record we rarely do shootouts for, simply because reasonably quiet, unscratched copies are getting more scarce by the day – much of what we can find is not in good enough condition to pass audiophile muster
  • 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.

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