Top Artists – Stephen Stills

Listening for a Bit Too Much Tubey Magic Down Low on Buffalo Springfield

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

Note to customers: We rarely have Hot Stamper pressings of Buffalo Springfield available on the site, so albums with Stephen Stills or Neil Young playing on them are about the best we can do these days. We regret we must go many years between shootouts for this seminal band’s albums, two of which are personal favorites of mine and have been since they were first released, 1968’s (Again) and 1969’s (Last Time Around) Thank god my older stepbrother had good taste in music. I doubt that many 14-year-olds were playing Buffalo Springfield albums, but I was, even though most of the time it was on 8-track tape.

On even the best copies I regret to say there’s a bit too much Tubey Magic in the bass. Tubbiness and bloat were par for the course. This may explain why so many copies have rolled off bass; the engineer cut the bass because he heard how tubby it was and figured no bass is better than bad bass. 

Which is just not true. Cutting the bass leans out and “modernizes” the sound, making the voices sound thinner and dryer. Less rich. This pretty much ruins everything on this album, just the way it ruins everything in many of the modern recordings I hear.

Having your bass under control on the playback side isn’t easy — in fact it’s probably the hardest thing to achieve in audio — but it can be done, and with good bass control the slightly wooly bass is just a part of the sound you learn to accept.

It doesn’t actually interfere much with your enjoyment of the music, mostly because all the other instruments and voices sounds so magical.


The post-it notes you see are very old, probably from the early 2000s.

Until we got our cleaning system sorted in 2007, shootouts for any of this band’s first three albums were going to be tough sledding, if not downright impossible.

In this commentary we describe what needed to change in order to make Buffalo Springfield shootouts a reality.

Want to find your own killer copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts. This album sounds its best:

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Buffalo Springfield – Self-Titled

More Buffalo Springfield

More Country and Country Rock

  • Boasting two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides or close to them, this early Atco pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Buffalo Springfield’s debut LP
  • True, side one earned a minimal Hot Stamper grade of 1.5+, but we still guarantee that it will beat the pants off any Heavy Vinyl reissue, because every one of those that we played was ridiculously opaque, muddy and thick enough to have us crying “uncle” after five minutes
  • We rarely have this title in stock, mostly because it is purely a matter of luck when we’ve managed to chance upon enough clean copies of the commonly-abused album to get a shootout going
  • Problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these early pressings, but once you hear just how superb sounding this copy is, you might be inclined, as we were, to stop counting ticks and pops and just be swept away by the music
  • 4 stars: “… this debut sounds pretty great, featuring some of their most melodic and accomplished songwriting and harmonies, delivered with a hard-rocking punch… The entire album bursts with thrilling guitar and vocal interplay, with a bright exuberance that would tone down considerably by their second record.”

For whatever reason, all the mastering engineers who cut this first album rarely managed to put any real top or bottom on the record. Why I can’t imagine. Highs and lows are on the tape; the best pressings prove it.

Listen for Tubey Magic, richness, bottom end, presence and freedom from distortion. The more copies you have tried in the past, the more astonishing the sound of this copy will be to you. (more…)

Helplessly Hoping to Get the VTA Right

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of C,S,N & (Sometimes) Young Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This listing from 2005 (!) contains commentary about VTA adjustment using the track Helplessly Hoping from a Hot Stamper pressing of CSN’s So Far. It would not be long before we started using the much more accurate and revealing 17D (first the 17D3, then the 17DX), which took us to another level, as documented here.

Helplessly Hoping is a wonderful song that has a lot of energy in the midrange and upper midrange which is difficult to reproduce properly. Just today (4/25/05) I was playing around with VTA, having recently installed a new Dynavector DV-20x on my playgrading table (a real sweetheart, by the way), and this song showed me EXACTLY how to get the VTA right.

VTA is all about balance.

The reason this song is so good for adjusting VTA is that the guitar at the opening is a little smooth and the harmony vocals that come in after the intro can be a little bright. Finding the balance between these two elements is key to getting the VTA adjusted properly.

When the arm is too far down in the back, the guitar at the opening will lose its transparency and become dull and thick. Too high in the back and the vocals sound thin and shrill, especially when the boys all really push their harmony. The slightest change in VTA will noticeably affect that balance and allow you to tune it in just right.

To be successful, however, there are also other conditions that need to be met. The system has to be sounding right, which in my world means good electricity, so make sure you do this in the evening or on a weekend when the electricity is better.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is that you need a good pressing that includes this song, and those don’t grow on trees.

The vast majority of CSN’s first album and the vast majority of So Far’s are junk.

Trying to get junk pressings to sound right is impossible, because they weren’t mastered right in the first place.

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Super Session Is the Poster Boy for Gritty, Spitty Vocals

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Kooper Available Now

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album, Child Is Father to the Man), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.

Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals can be a real problem on this album.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, the music on this album — like any rock and pop album — pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes.

On the better copies, the ones with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can crank the volume and let Super Session rock.

Testing with Super Session

This record, along with the others linked below, is good for testing the following qualities.

  1. Grit and grain
  2. Midrange tonality
  3. Sibilance (it’s a bitch) 
  4. Upper midrange brightness

Playing so many records day in and day out means that we wear out our Dynavector 17DX cartridges often, three or four times a year.

Which requires us to regularly mount a new cartridge in our Triplanar arm.

Once a new cartridge is broken in (50 hours minimum), we then proceed to carry out the fine setup work required to get it sounding its best. We do that by adjusting the VTA, azimuth and tracking weight for maximum fidelity using recordings we have been playing for decades and think we know well.

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Bloomfield-Kooper-Stills – Super Session on the 70s Red Label

More Classic Rock

  • With superb Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Super Session sound this good
  • Engineered by Roy Halee, the man behind one of the best sounding rock records of all time (the self-titled Blood, Sweat and Tears album), the oh-so-analog sound here is especially dynamic and spacious
  • It’s true, the 360 label pressings win our shootouts, but that doesn’t mean the right later label pressings aren’t nearly as good, as is the case with this one
  • For fans of BS&T’s first album (and everybody else), Super Session is a Must Own
  • “Season of the Witch” is crazy good on this vintage Red Label pressing
  • 4 1/2 stars: “This is one of those albums that seems to get better with age… This is a super session indeed.”

Here’s a copy that gets the midrange right. It’s nice and open, with lots of space around all of the instruments, tight punchy bass, and an extended top end. The energy level is right up there with some of the best we played.

“Man’s Temptation,” track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.

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Specific Critiques of All Four Sides of 4 Way Street

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

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.

Three Shootout Winning White Hot Stamper sides out of four! These three sides handily blow other copies out of the water, with the size, space, presence and energy that only the finest pressings are capable of. If you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this is the only copy that will let you do it. No other copy we’ve ever played rocked the way this one rocked! For three quarters of the “concert”, YOU ARE THERE.

If the singers get hard and shrill in the louder passages, then what you have is a pretty typical pressing. Add grit and grain, smeared transients, opacity, surface noise and a lack of weight down low and you’ll know why it takes us years to find enough copies to shoot out — because this is what most pressings sound like.

As you have surely read on the site by now, this band has put out more bad pressings of good recordings than practically any I can think of. Here is an excerpt from our review of their first album that discusses the issue in more depth.

Wrong Sound

95% of all the pressings of this album I’ve ever played have been disappointing. They’re almost always wrong, each in their own way of course. Some are dull, some are shrill, some are aggressive, some have no bass — every mastering fault you can imagine can be heard on one copy or another of this record. The bottom line? If you want to buy them and try them from your local record store, plan on spending hundreds of dollars and putting in years of frustrating effort, perhaps with little to show for it in the end. This is one tough nut to crack; it’s best to know that going in.

Sound So Real

The song “Triad”, for example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and acoustic guitar. It’s as real sounding as anything I’ve ever heard from this band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded significantly relative to what the original microphones picked up.

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. (Later CSN albums are mostly dreadful. Fortunately later Neil Young albums, e.g., Zuma, are often Demo Discs of the highest quality.)

More records for which we’ve detailed the strengths and weaknesses of a specific shootout copy.

Side One

Big, clear, present, dynamic — what’s not to like? It shows you what few copies can: how well-recorded the album is. Halverson did a great job but you have to work your tail off to find a copy that does his brilliant engineering justice. Sad, isn’t it?

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On Super Session, Tonally Correct Vocals Are Key

More Music Produced or Performed by Al Kooper

Most copies have bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals.

The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong, this album pretty much falls apart.

Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud. At higher volumes the distortion and grit are just too much.

On the better copies, the one with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

Man’s Temptation, track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange, you are doing better than expected.

We’re Big Fans

Super Session is an album we think we know well, one that checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut – An Overview

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

Below you will find some of the more popular commentaries we’ve written about Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut. It’s an album I have been obsessed with since the age of 15, which I enjoyed mostly on 8-track tape back then.

For those of you too young to know about these things, that speaks volumes about the quality of turntable at the time, which was mounted to an all-in-one auto-changing record player, attached to an AM/FM receiver complete with 8-track tape playback. The thing probably retailed for less than a hundred bucks and sounded like it.

This is also one of the records that we’ve often used to test with in order to improve the quality of our playback over the years, along with scores of others you can read about here on the blog.

Don’t expect to find any Hot Stamper pressings on the site though. They are very hard to find, due to the fact that the right reissues are the only ones that sound good to us and they apparently just did not make very many of them.

Listening in Depth to Crosby Stills and Nash

Although millions of copies of this album were sold, so few were mastered and pressed well, and so many mastered and pressed poorly, that few copies actually make it to the site as Hot Stampers.

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 these days.

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.)

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Letter of the Week – “It has been a long time since I’ve connected with whatever it was that I connected with on this LP.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

One of our good customers wrote us a letter recently about his Stephen Stills Hot Stamper pressing.

You can read his first letter here.

About a week later he followed up with this one. It seems he fell in love with it. That can happen when you play a good sounding copy after nearing nothing but junk your whole life.

Hi Tom,
That NWHS [more here] of Stills’ first is EPIC! It is now in my top ten desert island discs.

I no longer have words… it’s just f**king epic. Obviously, I had no idea… not a clue.

After closed eyes listening to the last song on side 1, I was like WTF, that was really really intense… vocals… guitars.

So when it was done I looked at the back of the cover to see what was what… aha… Clapton!

It has been a long time since I’ve connected with whatever it was that I connected with on this LP.

What a gift. Simply outrageous sound.

Michel

Michel,

You and I both know that the connection you speak of is the only one that matters when listening to music.

That Stills record is definitely going to my desert island too. I bought mine in 1970 and I listen to it to this very day.

I’ve written a fair amount about the album. Used to use it as a test disc, something I have not discussed on this blog because there are not enough hours in the day to talk about all the records I have used as test discs. But this album make a great test disc if you’ve got big speakers and like to play them good and loud.

Here is an excerpt from an older commentary discussing Bill Halverson‘s superb engineering.

Some of the most sought-after records in the world, as well as the most difficult to find with high quality sound, are those involving the various groupings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

This album is no exception. It’s Stills’ masterpiece, a record I’ve been playing since I was in high school. The sound on the LPs I bought over the years has been pretty consistently disappointing. It’s refreshing to actually find a copy like this that lets you hear the album the way you remember it.

There’s a very good chance — bordering on a certainty — that the copy you played back then was no doubt just as poor sounding, but you remember it sounding good.

That, more than anything else, is why we audiophiles keep chasing after so many classic albums from our younger days. We’re trying to find the record that can give us the musical satisfaction in the present that we achieved so easily in the past, before we knew anything about audio and record pressings.

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Crosby, Stills and Nash – CSN

More David Crosby

More Stephen Stills

More Graham Nash

  • This copy of CS&N’s “comeback” album boasts a KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side one mated to a superb Double Plus (A++) side two
  • The sound is big and relatively rich, the vocals breathy and immediate, and you will not believe all the space and ambience – which of course are all qualities that Heavy Vinyl records have far too little of, and the main reason we have lost all respect for the bulk of them
  • Includes CS&N classics “Dark Star,” “Just A Song Before I Go,” and “Fair Game”
  • 4 stars: “It has held up remarkably well, both as a memento of its time, and as a thoroughly enjoyable musical work.”

Most copies of CSN are unbelievably flat, harsh, thin and opaque, which means simply that our approach is the only one that offers any hope of success in finding good sound on this album.

With a large enough batch of copies, cleaned using the best fluids, on the best machines, it is possible to find two sides this good. Without a pretty big batch of well-cleaned pressings, your chance of success is hardly worth calculating. Even with the best intentions, frustration is likely to set in long before a Hot Stamper has much chance of being found.

Most copies have a tendency to sound dry, so look for one that’s rich and full-bodied. Most copies are opaque and flat so look for those with transparency and ambience. Most copies are lean down low and dull up top; try to find the ones with bass and real top-end extension.

And of course you need to find a copy that gets the voices right. CS&N’s albums live or die by the quality of their vocals, a subject we have discussed on the site at length.

You think the first CS&N album has problems in the sound department? Of course it does; in 1969 lots of rock records had recording problems. But CSN was released in 1977. By 1977, there were scores of talented rock engineers producing top quality multi-track recordings. Our Top 100 is full of their best work.

One would have thought that CS&N, the ultimate perfectionists (according to their press accounts), would have hired the best and sweated out every detail in the studio in order to produce a recording the equal of Rumours or The Cars debut (even if the songs themselves, to be honest, weren’t quite the equal of their earlier work).

Alas, CS&N chose the Albert brothers, whose most famous album is Layla. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Laylas — we’ve done the shootout many times — and of course, there are better and worse CSNs.

The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side, some songs have the breath of life and some don’t. That’s a recording problem. It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like “Shadow Captain” and “Dark Star,” among others.

But “Just a Song Before I Go” on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.

So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best do well and the rest do poorly and grade accordingly, on the curve.

Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got.

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