Top Artists – Judy Collins

Our Previous Shootout Winner for Judith Was in 2014

UPDATE 2025

We finally got this shootout going again, and you can find our latest review here.

White Hot A+++ sound on side two of this 2-pack, with Shootout Winning sound. Great material including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns. Another 2-pack that proves our case – the good sides here are wonderful, the bad sides plainly awful.

The engineer for Judith is Phil Ramone, who went on to win the Grammy the following year for Still Crazy After All These Years. (more…)

Judy Collins – In My Life

More Judy Collins

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Judy Collins

  • With a nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side two and a seriously good Double Plus (A++) side one, this Elektra Gold Label stereo pressing will be very hard to beat – reasonably quiet vinyl too  
  • Two of the best tracks are here on this Nearly White Hot side two: Sunny Goodge Street and In My Life, and both sound every bit as good as you would expect from a side with such a high grade
  • Here’s the midrange magic that’s missing from the reissues and whatever 180g pressing has been made from the tapes (or, to be clear, a modern digital master copied from who-knows-what-tapes)
  • “Judy Collins was already an accomplished interpretive singer before recording this album, but In My Life found her widening her horizons and revealing an even greater gift than one might have imagined.”

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Colors of the Day – DCC Discussed

A classic case of live and learn, maybe. Previously we had written:

Superb sonics. Judy has never sounded better. Not a big seller for DCC but it should have been. Those sweet acoustic guitars are hard to beat. No modern recording has sounded like this for over twenty years, so if you’ve forgotten what a real acoustic guitar sounds like, buy this record and get reacquainted with that sound. Tons of breath of life, superb production and mastering so you can clearly hear her hitting those flat notes (!), and some of the best sounding echo ever recorded.

UPDATE 2007

Addendum to the above comments, posted 11/07

I wrote the above review many many years ago. As you may have read countless times on the site by now, it is my opinion that all such dated judgments are suspect. The major revolutions in vinyl playback that have occurred over the last dozen years have turned many of these old comments on their heads.

Hot Stamper pressings again and again have revealed magic in the mass-produced copies that is simply nowhere to be found in their audiophile counterparts.

Whether this is true for this particular title I can honestly say I don’t know.  We are going to play some copies of the album and will report our findings down the road, so Judy Collins fans, stay tuned.

Judy Collins – Judy Collins #3

More Judy Collins

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Judy Collins

  • With a nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) side one and a seriously good Double Plus (A++) side two, this pressing will be very hard to beat – exceptionally QUIET vinyl too  
  • The “breath of life” is alive and well on these old LPs, the best reason for the truly serious audiophile to stay committed to analog
  • “Having established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of traditional material, Collins did the same for contemporary folk songwriters on this album, which mixed standards with pristine covers of compositions by Dylan, Pete Seeger and Shel Silverstein. With Jim (Roger) McGuinn arranging and playing second guitar and banjo, this album, which included a fine version of Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” had a clear (if overlooked) influence on the folk-rock he pioneered with the Byrds.”

We had a devil of a time finding clean, quiet, good sounding copies of this album. The mono pressings, which are far more common than the stereo pressings, didn’t sound right to us, and everything produced after the Big Red E label era is a joke, which leaves the Folksinger label pressings from 1963 and the Gold Label pressings from 1965. Both can be good. This LP was by far the quietest we played, which makes it very special indeed. (more…)