Top Artists – Neil Young

When We First Started Doing Shootouts, They Would Sometimes Go on for Days

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Our first Hot Stamper listing for After the Gold Rush from back in 2005 talked about what a struggle it was doing them at first.

Back then, with not much in the way of staff, I often had to put the records on the table one at a time and do all the listening and note-taking myself.

For our first Hot Stamper listing I wrote:

A record like this might go through 4 or 5 stages of cleaning and listening and cleaning again. I spent many hours listening to the various copies I played over the course of two days, first one track, then another, this copy, then that one. There’s no other way to do it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no substitute for hard work.

If you can call it that. It ain’t too hard playing a great album over and over again. Some people — myself included — might even call it fun. And now I love this album more than I ever did. I feel like I have come to know it. I’m positively thrilled to finally know how good it really is!

Isn’t that why we audiophiles go through all this shite, as the Brits say? When I hear a piece of familiar music sound better than I ever thought I would hear it, better than I ever imagined it, it’s everything to me. It’s the biggest thrill I know of in audio. It’s what I live for. If you like that feeling, this is the record for you!

I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I find another copy that sounds like this one, but I’m guessing it’s going to be a long time. How many bad domestic rock records did I have to play in order to find a record that sounds like this? A hundred? More?! Who knows? It was a lot, that’s for damn sure.

Speaking of Thrills

We admit to being thrillseekers here at Better Records, and make no apologies for it.

The better the system and the hotter the stamper, the bigger the thrill.

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Letter of the Week – “Here is where the life and groove of the music is!”

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

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

What a batch of records! I just finished playback last night.

It only occurred to me afterwards that some of these titles I had only heard on compact disc or streaming, I thought I knew this music but the Hot Stampers – particularly Aja and CSNY So Far – defied me.

Here is where the life and groove of the music is! The digital formats have been calling my attention to all the wrong details.

I could go on and on. All eight titles are a knockout. Close To The Edge is a monster – the presentation is massive, and I’m sure my system isn’t doing it full justice, but I love this record and it’s by far the best I have ever heard it.

Thanks again to the Better Records team for everything you do – for this music lover it’s manna from heaven.

Cheers,

Austin

Austin,

Yes, you are so right about the digital formats. They get the sound of classic albums wrong by drawing your attention to recording details at the expense of the flow and drive and energy of the music.

As for So Far, I am a huge Crosby, Stills and Nash fan — the first album being life-changing to a 15 year old music lover such as myself, on 8-track tape in the car no less — and my ardor never flagged in all the years that have gone by since then.

It seems that there are some albums that will last you a lifetime — the first two albums, produced in 1969 and 1970, are still right at the top of my All Time Favorites.

Close to the Edge is a monster and always has been. I listen to it regularly, along with The Yes Album and Fragile. What a run of albums they released before hitting a wall with Tales of Topographic Oceans in 1973.

Aja is record I have been writing about for decades. It’s often an overblown mess, on vintage and modern pressings alike.

The copies that do well in our shootouts are the ones that are coherent, where the over-production suits the songs and does not draw too much attention to itself.

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Neil Young – Old Ways

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • A vintage pressing with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • Big, full-bodied and energetic, with remarkably present vocals – this kind of rich, analog sound is positively shocking for a recording from 1985, although it should not come as a surprise since Neil Young has often gone against the grain
  • Neil’s unabashed country album is guaranteed to make your MoFI pressing sound like the bad joke it was when it came out in 1996, and you can be sure that it has not aged well
  • “… this turns out to be his most carefully crafted album since Comes a Time… Pretty amazing.” – Rolling Stone
  • “Old Ways [is]…cut in the style of Harvest and Comes a Time, but with a stronger country leaning.”

This is Neil heading out to the sticks with his buddies, authentic country greats such as Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others (nice friends to have), doing what Neil loves to do — making the music that HE wants to make, not the music that anyone else wants him to, including David Geffen and his lawyers. Old friend Ben Keith (a huge part behind the sound of Harvest) shows up with his pedal steel guitar on a couple of tracks.

This probably wasn’t anyone’s favorite Neil Young album, but when it sounds like it does here it sure makes a lot more sense than it did when we heard it on the more mediocre pressings. The MoFi is a muckfest, as was to be expected from a record mastered during the Anadisq era, the darkest chapter in the dark and disgraceful history of Mobile Fidelity.

Copies with rich lower mids and nice extension up top (to keep the string arrangements from becoming shrill) did the best in our shootout, assuming they weren’t too veiled or smeary, of course. (more…)

Mobile Fidelity Actually Produced a New and Improved Deja Vu in 1983

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

A letter came to us years ago with the comment “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

As the time I made some of the following comments in reply and have added a few new ones since then.

Deja Vu is indeed a very special album, 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, playing over and over on 8-track tape in the car no less — so it was only natural that I would fall in love with Deja Vu when it came out in 1970.

13 Years Go By

Time 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 be familiar with, Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs.

I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound.

This is not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are, but let us give credit where credit is due. With the volume cranked good and loud,  I often played the first track, Carry On, using the MoFi pressing to demonstrate how smooth, rich, big, powerful and dynamic my system could sound.

“The CD may be taking over the world,” I would say, because by 1983 that was exactly what was happening, “but you”ll never hear a CD that sounds like this!”

13 More Years Go By

It would take me 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 recessed their pressing was.

Here is the real shocker from that time: I actually thought that the extremely hard-to-find reissue I’d discovered was so flukishly good that it could never be beaten by any other pressing!

(To be fair, my long-time audiophile buddy Robert Pincus probaby deserves the credit for finding it. He found a great many special pressings for me back when I was buying records from him, reaching all the way back to 1987.)

Which is yet another example of everything being relative. I admit I had a poor understanding of that vitally important concept at the time. I really had no idea how good a recording Deja Vu was, and I didn’t really have a way to find out because many of the most important revolutions in audio had not been incorporated into my system, or had yet to be invented.

Within the last five years or so another domestic pressing, and now most recently an import (!), have come to be seen as clearly superior to all of these.

This is the result of having never given up the search for a better Deja Vu.

Record Collecting in My World

Anticipating the release of the newest Half-Speed remastered pressing that would deliver me from the evils of the garden-variety 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 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 stand athwart audio history and yell “Stop.”

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Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • An original (and very cool) Black Label Reprise pressing of Neil Young’s brilliant sixth studio album with solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • This side one gives you clean, clear, full-bodied, lively and musical analog sound from first note to last, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • Spaciousness, richness and freedom from grit and grain are key to the better pressings, and here you will find all three (particularly on side one)
  • 5 stars: “…Young’s musical expression of grief, combined with his rejection of the stardom he had achieved in the late 60s and early 70s … was immediately recognized as a unique masterpiece by critics, and it has continued to be ranked as one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever made.”
  • If you’re a fan of Mr. Young — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this dark classic from 1975 belongs in your collection.

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Letter of the Week – “I think It’s a bargain at $800. It absolutely trashes my Mofi version…”

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

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the Crosby Still, Nash & Young Deja Vu White Hot stamper A+++ on both sides and absolutely dead quiet. I think It’s a bargain at $800.00. It absolutely trashes my Mofi version into bits and pieces. I don’t even want to mention the Classic records version because it’s painful to listen to. I’m writing up this record today and the Frank Sinatra and Count Basie Live at the Sands tomorrow.

Thanks,

Naz

Naz,

The Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered pressings of Deja Vu are, as you say, practically unlistenable once you know what that record should really sound like, and now that you have a Hot Stamper pressing, you definitely know just how good the record can sound.

Demo Disc barely begins to do it justice.

Hey, I was fooled back in the mid-’80s – I used to demonstrate my system with the MoFi Deja Vu! How screwed up is that?

Let’s just say we have made a lot of progress in audio since then. We’ve learned a great deal about record collecting too, practically all of it derived from the thousands of shootouts we’ve conducted over the last twenty years, using tens of thousands of different pressings.

I’m Starting to Get a Bad Feeling About Record Store Day

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

For some reason, don’t ask me why, they keep hiring Chris Bellman to make Heavy Vinyl reissues of Neil Young’s albums, even though he has shown again and again that he has no idea what these recordings are supposed to sould like.

So far he’s ruined After the Gold Rush and Neil Young’s Greatest Hits, and there may be others he’s remastered to death, but no copies of those have come our way so we really don’t know, or care to know, to be honest.

If this is your idea of analog, you are most likely in the wrong hobby and should consider finding a different one. At the very least you are wasting your time and money on worthless crap vinyl pressings put out by the legion of Heavy Vinyl Grifters who emerge from the bowels of the earth on Record Store Day, targeting their rip-off LPs at the low- to mid-fi vinyl collector types who have yet to figure out what a giant scam the whole thing is.

These records have virtually no redeeming features, none that we could find anyway. Allow us to catalog the shortcomings of the three sides that comprise the 2017 Record Store Day release of Harvest Moon.

For the first time in five years we had finally been able to do a shootout for the imports we like, so we knew exactly how good the best pressings could sound. Long story short, they sure don’t sound like this!

Side One

Track Two (From Hank to Hendrix)

  • Blary harmonica
  • Much more treble
  • Still flat and dry
  • Just louder with less bottom
  • Edgy vocals in the chorus

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Neil Young – Harvest Moon

More of the Music of Neil Young

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades from top to bottom, this vintage import pressing is doing just about everything right – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • Full-bodied, big, rich and solid, this album has the kind of analog sound we did not expect to find, but were pleasantly surprised, thank goodness
  • Turn this one up good and loud (which you can do when the sound is this good) and you’ll have a living, breathing Neil Young standing right in front of you
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • “Harvest Moon manages to be sentimental without being sappy, wistful without being nostalgic… a beautiful album that proudly displays scars, heartaches, and love.”

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Before 2016 We Were Completely Wrong About Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

There are two areas in which we would like to amend some of the previous comments we’ve made about Deja Vu.

The first has to do with early pressings. Many years ago we wrote the following:

As we noted in previous commentary, the originals are uniformly awful. 

Although that’s mostly still true — Deja Vu is a very difficult album to find with good sound no matter what stampers you have. However, we now know that there are very good sounding copies — Shootout Winning copies in fact — with early stampers.

Deja Vu is in fact a title in which one stamper always wins, and that stamper can only be found on the early pressings.

Amazingly enough, there are more than 90 others (as of 2025) that we’ve discovered with one killer set of stampers that beat all comers as well. (There are surely many more hundreds that do, we just haven’t found them all yet. Please be patient; we are working on it.)

That’s area number one. Area number two is part of this old piece of advice:

If you bought the Classic Records pressing and you can’t tell what’s wrong with it, this may not be the right hobby for you. I highly recommend you buy the Joe Gastwirt mastered CD and either play it on your system or take it to a hi-fi store in your area. It’s tonally correct and undistorted. The Classic version is neither. Now when a stupid $15 CD is correct in a way that a $40 LP is not, something is very very wrong.

The part where we said this may not be the right hobby for you if you like Classic’s godawful remastering of Deja Vu is still true, depending on what exactly you’re trying to accomplish in the hobby.

If you’re not too picky about sound quality and just want to play new records, perhaps because old records are hard to find and often noisy, then fine, the Classic should get that job done for you.

We of course want nothing to do with it because we want exceptionally good sounding vinyl, and the Classic is definitely not very good sounding no matter how many nice things audiophile reviewers may have said about it.

No, the problem we see above is that we were recommending the currently available CD.

Yes, it’s mostly tonally correct and not distorted, but it has a bad a case of dead-as-a-doornail sound.

It’s as awful sounding as any remastered CD I have ever heard.

There is no top, there is no space, there is no life, there is no immediacy, there is no Tubey Magic — in short there is almost nothing left of what makes the best copies of Deja Vu so good.

We’ve known this for about five ten years, apologies for not getting around to correcting the record.

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Letter of the Week – “…this record knocked my socks off.”

More of the Music of Neil Young

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

Hey Tom, 

I just played your hot stamper pressing of Neil Young After the Gold Rush, and WOW! I don’t always agree with everyone else on which record pressings sound best, but this record knocked my socks off. 

No doubt about this one. I compared it to a recent German/Dutch reissue, which I remember sounding better than the crappy US pressing I previously had, and the difference was amazing. The soundstage was huge, I heard instruments playing right in front of me, dynamics were great, the bass drum on Only Love Can Break Your Heart was deep and extended, guitars were full, and so on.

I hadn’t played this record in a while mainly because it was, well, a lousy recording, which is a shame because it is one of my favorite records. I am sure I will be playing this version a lot more. Too bad for those who haven’t heard this pressing. (more…)