More of the Music of Neil Young
Reviews and Commentaries for After the Gold Rush
For our review of the new Heavy Vinyl After the Gold Rush we wrote:
Cleverly the engineers responsible for this remaster have managed to reproduce the sound of a dead studio on a record that wasn’t recorded in one.
This pressing has no real space or ambience. Now the album sounds like it was recorded in a heavily baffled studio, but we know that’s not what happened, because the originals of After the Gold Rush, like most of Neil’s other albums from the era, are clear, open and spacious.
In other words, they are transparent.
Modern records, like the new [now not so new] After the Gold Rush, are just so damn opaque. We can’t stand that sound. It drives us crazy. Important musical information — the kind we hear on even second-rate regular pressings — is simply nowhere to be found. That audiophiles as a group — including those that pass themselves off as champions of analog in the audio press — do not notice these failings does not speak well for either their equipment or their critical listening skills.
Once you hear a top quality Hot Stamper pressing, those 180 gram records you own may never sound right to you again. They sure don’t sound right to us, but we are in the enviable position of being able to play the best properly-cleaned older pressings (reissues included) side by side with the newer ones.
This allows the faults of the current reissues to become much more recognizable, to the point of actually being quite obvious. When you can hear different pressings that way, head to head, there really is no comparison.
FURTHER READING
There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are awful.
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have! Take your pick: there are more than 150 entries in our Heavy Vinyl Disasters section, each one worse sounding than the next.
Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.
(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and record collecting in the Seventies.)
How could so many be fooled so badly? Surely some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear the limitations of these modern pressings.
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