Top Artists – Stephen Stills

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

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  • 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.

Watch Out For

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; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes. On the better copies, with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.

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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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Select Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Below you will find some of the more popular commentaries we’ve written about the album.

For more album overviews like this one, please click here.

Listening in Depth to Crosby Stills & Nash – Now with Bonus CD Advice

Crosby Stills & Nash – Critical Listening Exercise

Detail on Crosby, Stills and Nash – Holy Grail or Audio Trap?

VTA Adjustment Using the Classic Records LP

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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

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  • 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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Letter of the Week – “I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

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:

Hey Tom, 

Tom, I just listened to the White Hot Stamper (A+++) CSNY album.

Amazing. I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound. Worth every penny.

The sound at low volume is amazing. The sound at high volume is spectacular.

The clarity, the depth, the soundstage are very rich and alive with color and presence.

Thank you! I am now going to investigate your piece on the cleaning process.

Rocco

Rocco,

Glad you liked this copy as much as we did! 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, 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.

Years 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 have heard of, Mobile Fidelity.

I realized instantly that Mobile Fidelity had indeed improved upon the average original’s sound. (Not a high bar considering how awful sounding most originals are.)

It would take me and my staff 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 limited it was.

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Stephen Stills – Self-Titled

More Stephen Stills

  • With outstanding sound throughout, this copy of Still’s superb debut is doing just about everything right
  • Love the One You’re With and Sit Yourself Down are to die for, but there’s really not a bad track on the album
  • A triumph of engineering for Bill Halverson and Andy Johns – this and Deja Vu are the very definition of Big Production Rock
  • A member of our top 100 and a true rock demo disc, especially if you can play it on big speakers at loud levels
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Listening to this album three decades on, it’s still a jaw-dropping experience, the musical equal to Crosby, Stills & Nash or Déjà Vu, and only a shade less important than either of them.”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1970, one that deserves a place in any audiophile’s pop and rock section

When we say it’s getting harder and harder to find clean copies of albums such as this in the bins of our local record stores, we are not kidding. (more…)

Listening in Depth to Deja Vu

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

DEJA VU is an album we admit to being obsessed with — just look at the number of commentaries we’ve written about it. It’s yet another in the long list of rock and pop records that really come alive on big speakers at loud levels .

One obvious reason that our turn up your volume is such a good test is that the louder the problem, the harder it is to ignore.

Presenting another entry in our extensive listening in depth series with advice on what to listen for as you critically evaluate your copy of Deja Vu. Here are some albums on our site you can buy with similar track by track breakdowns.

Side One

Carry On

This song is a great test for the quality of the vocals. If you can get through the first part of the song with little to no strain in the voices, you’re on the right track.

The bass on this track always lacks a measure of definition, but you’ll know by track three if your bass is solid enough to set the foundation this music requires to really get going. Carry On has a huge number of overdubs, so it will never have very high resolution, but on a Hot Stamper copy like this one it can sound wonderful.

Teach Your Children 
Almost Cut My Hair

One of the key test tracks we use for side one, this is the only time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young actually sounds like a rock and roll band. According to Stephen Barncard this was recorded live in the studio. It sure sounds like it. The amount of energy the band generates on this track exceeds all the energy of the first album put together.

The reason this track presents such a tough test is that it has to be mastered perfectly in order to make you want to turn it up as loud as your stereo will play. This song is not for sipping wine and smoking cigars. It positively cries out to be played at serious volume levels on monstrously large speakers. Nothing else will do justice to the power of the band’s one and only live performance.

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The Turn Up Your Volume Test – Almost Cut My Hair

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

The only time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young actually sound like a real rock and roll band is on the track Almost Cut My Hair.

According to Stephen Barncard, one of the engineers on Deja Vu, the track was actually recorded live in the studio.

Boy, it sure sounds like it. The amount of energy the band generates on this one song exceeds the energy of the entire first album put together. 

The reason this song presents such a tough test is that it has to be mastered properly in order to make you want to turn it up, not just louder, but as loud as your stereo will play.

This song is not to be used as background music whilst sipping wine and smoking cigars.

It positively cries out to be played at serious volume levels on monstrously large speakers. Nothing else will do justice to the power of the band’s one and only live performance captured on the album.

Listen to Neil in the left channel wailing away like a man possessed. Imagine what his grunged-out guitar would sound like blasting out of a stack of Marshall amps the size of a house.

Now hold that sound in your head as you turn up the volume on your preamp.

When your system starts to distort, back it off a notch and take your seat.

Deja Vu Letters

Some of our customers have written to tell us about the amazing sound they heard on our Hot Stamper pressings of Deja Vu.

“I know in one sense you’re only doing your job but who the hell else does what you do?”
“I almost fell off my listening chair.”
“I think It’s a bargain at $800. It absolutely trashes my Mofi version…”
“I had no idea that vinyl could produce this sound.”

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