Top Artists – Neil Young

On the Beach – Here’s the Live in the Studio Sound We Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we described a Shootout Winning early pressing with the comments you see below. (Please excuse the excessive capitalization.)

We’ve been trying for a while to find a copy of this album with the kind of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sound we get from the best copies of Zuma and After The Gold Rush, but it hasn’t been easy.

However, on the best copies, the title track is out of this world.

It’s got that live-in-the-studio sound we recognize and love from Zuma, but in this case it sounds like it was recorded at three in the morning in a room full of pot smoke.

When you play a Hot Stamper copy, the soundfield is huge — big, wide, and deep — and there’s lots of space around all the instruments. You will not believe all the studio ambience, and you may even catch a contact high from it.

Two Knockout Sides

Side one held its own against every copy we threw against it, earning our top grade of A+++. The sound is relaxed, musical, and SUPER transparent — there’s virtually nothing between you and the music. Neil’s voice is PERFECTION with lots of texture, and it is surrounded by lovely ambience.

Play the second track, See The Sky About To Rain, to hear some mellow magic. Neil’s work on the wurlitzer sounds fantastic, and the soft, breathy vocals are bound to give you goosebumps.

(more…)

Letter of the Week – “The sound is incredible. Neil’s voice is right in the room.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently, including After the Goldrush and Beatles For Sale: 

Hey Tom, 

Just wanted to write and tell you how much I love that Neil Young After The Gold Rush White Hot Stamper I picked up last week. Really awesome. This ranks up with the best I’ve bought from you guys.

The sound is incredible. Neil’s voice is right in the room. The guitar sounds real and that harmonica is super. I love when he performs, just him and nobody else. I’m really stuck on Neil’s albums. The sound is just soooo good. I’m working on my system to get more out of these records.

Oh yeah, I picked up one of your “Beatles for Sale” albums for $65. [This must be an old letter!] Really nice for the money. Those Beatles albums can really be awesome. Have to get a White Hot Stamper Beatles album someday. (more…)

Neil Young – Time Fades Away

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) front row center sound or BETTER throughout this early Reprise pressing
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be shocked at how big and powerful the sound is
  • A solid step up from most other copies we played in our most recent shootout – full-bodied, smooth and musical, the classic sound of Neil Young at his performing peak
  • 4 stars: “…sounds very much of a piece with Tonight’s the Night and On the Beach, albums that explored the troubled zeitgeist of America in the mid-70s in a way few rockers had the courage to face. If the performances are often loose and ragged, they’re also brimming with emotional force… Time Fades Away ranks with the bravest and most painfully honest albums of his career… it isn’t for everyone, but you may be surprised by its powerful effects.”

Unlike most “live” albums, this one was made direct to tape, with no fixes or overdubs, and on the best pressings that warts-and-all approach really pays off. There’s good weight, real openness, and the tonality on these better copies is both rich and sweet. This kind of sound can put you right in the front row.

Finding a copy like this is no walk in the park. The stamper numbers are all over the map, providing little if any guidance. Also, since the album didn’t sell all that well and was never released on CD [although it may have been since this was written; we pay very little attention to that sort of thing], there just aren’t that many clean copies floating around.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Is So Far Really Just a Waste of Money?

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

The All Music Guide considers So Far to be a waste of money (on CD) because it was a slapped together effort to capitalize on CSN’s success, combining material from only two albums and then adding two unreleased tracks.

Their attitude boils down to the idea that the first two records are essential, so why buy this album for two songs?

I’ll tell you why.

Because finding good sounding pressings of either of the first two albums is practically impossible for the average audiophile record collector.

I mean that literally: as a practical matter, it is very, very difficult to find Hot Stamper versions of the band’s first two releases. This is especially true for the self-titled album from 1969, which sounds best in our experience on a later reissue that we have a devil of time finding and therefore rarely have in stock.

Both the first two albums and So Far are records we credit with helping us dramatically improve the playback quality of our system.

A Few Words About Deja Vu

Deja Vu is a special album for me, one I have been obsessed with since I first became an audiophile.

I was a big Crosby, Stills and Nash fan already — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the care no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

(more…)

Neil Young – Harvest

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • This vintage Reprise pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Neil’s undeniable classic, with both sides earning stunning Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • It’s practically impossible to find an early pressing with sound this good and vinyl that plays as quietly as this
  • Marks in the vinyl are another matter, though – those on “Out on the Weekend” are especially bad but if you can tough those out, this copy is going to blow your mind
  • A Top 100 album and a sublime recording no audiophile should be without
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…the love songs and the harrowing portrait of a friend’s descent into heroin addiction, ‘The Needle and the Damage Done,’ remain among Young’s most affecting and memorable songs.”
  • If you’re a Neil Young fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1972 is clearly a Must Own

When you have this kind of open, extended top end, the grit, grain and edge just disappear, leaving you with a clear, Tubey Magical sound that’s way beyond anything you have ever heard for Harvest (or we will happily give you your money back).

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

(more…)

Neil Young – Live Rust

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • You’ll find roughly Shootout Winning Triple (A+++) sound or close to it on all FOUR sides of these vintage Reprise pressings
  • Not many recordings, live or otherwise, give you this kind of unvarnished, front-row experience
  • This killer live set, the ultimate Neil Young acoustic and electric concert collection, combines brilliant early material like “After the Gold Rush” with wonderful later songs such as the amazing “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and “Tonight’s the Night”
  • 4 1/2 stars on AllMusic, just check the tracklisting and get ready to hear these NY classics come to life

(more…)

Listening in Depth to Harvest

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Many copies we played would work for the heavy songs and then fall short on the quieter tracks. Others had gorgeous sound on the country-tinged numbers but couldn’t deliver much whomp* for the rockers.

Only a select group of copies could hold their own in all of the styles and engage us from start to finish. We’re pleased to present those exceptional pressings as the Hot Stamper copies of Harvest that so many of you have been begging for.

Side One

Out on the Weekend

We love the sound of the drums on Neil Young records — think of the punchy kick drum on After The Gold Rush and the punchy thwack of the snare on Zuma. On the best copies, this song should have the kind of BIG, BOLD Neil Young drum sound we audiophiles have been in love with since the album first came out.

The pedal steel guitar also sounds out of this world on the best copies.

(more…)

How Does the Heavy Vinyl Pressing of Harvest Sound?

 Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

How does the Heavy Vinyl of Harvest sound?

We have no idea. We’ve never played a copy.

Actually, that’s not true. We do have an idea.

Although we’ve never auditioned the Heavy Vinyl pressing of Harvest, we have played the newly remastered After the Gold Rush. We concluded that this is a reissue series that should hold very little appeal for audiophiles. Some excerpts from our review:

We know what the good pressings of the album sound like, we play them regularly, and this newly remastered vinyl is missing almost everything that makes the album essential to any Right Thinking Music Lover’s collection.

We can summarize the sound of this awful record in one word: boring. Since some of you may want to know more than that we’ll be happy to break it down for you a bit further.

What It Does Right

It’s tonally correct.

Can’t think of anything else…

What It Does Wrong

Where to begin?

It has no real space or ambience. When you play this record it sounds as if they must have recorded it in a heavily padded studio. Somehow the originals of After the Gold Rush, like most of Neil’s classic albums from the era, are clear, open and spacious.

Cleverly the engineers responsible for this audiophile remastering have managed to reproduce the sound of a dead studio on a record that wasn’t recorded in one.

In addition, the record never gets loud. The good pressings get very loud. They rock, they’re overflowing with energy.

And, lastly, there’s no real weight to the bottom end. The whomp factor on this new pressing is practically non-existent. The low end of the originals is huge, deep and powerful.

The Bottom Line

This new Heavy Vinyl pressing is boring beyond belief (tip of the hat to Elvis Costello there). I wouldn’t give you a nickel for it. If Neil Young actually had anything to do with it he should be ashamed of himself.

If you want a good copy of the album we have them on the site from time to time. If you can’t afford our Hot Stampers, please don’t waste your money on this one. I have an old CD from 30 years ago, and it is dramatically better than this LP.

Pass / Not Yet

We think the Heavy Vinyl pressing of After the Gold Rush is so awful that whatever supporters it may have — and there are surely some who have spoken highly of it on audiophile forums somewhere, having seen the most ridiculously bad audiophile records touted again and again — are failing utterly in this hobby in one or both of the following ways.

(more…)

Buffalo Springfield – Retrospective

More of the Music of Buffalo Springfield

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides, this original Atco pressing will be very hard to beat
  • Big, full-bodied, clear and present, the Tubey Magical richness of the better pressings is a joy to hear on modern high resolution equipment (particularly on this side two)
  • “Kind Woman” and “I Am A Child” are just two of the best sounding songs – listen to all that space around the voices and instruments (particularly “I Am A Child” on this side two)
  • And the Pysch stuff – “On the Way Home,” “Broken Arrow” and “Expecting to Fly” – is guaranteed to be more three-dimensional than you’ve ever heard it
  • 5 stars on AllMusic – this is Must Own Music from one of the most groundbreaking and accomplished groups of the late-60s (even though they never cracked the Top 40 Album chart)

(more…)