Top Artists – Stephen Stills

Buffalo Springfield – Again

More Country and Country Rock

  • Buffalo Springfield’s sophomore release is back on the site with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Tubey Magical Analog sound or close to it from from start to finish – unusually quiet vinyl for an ATCO original as well
  • Consistently brilliant songwriting and production: “Mr. Soul,” “A Child’s Claim To Fame,” “Expecting To Fly,” “Bluebird,” “Hung Upside Down,” “Rock & Roll Woman,” “Broken Arrow” and more!
  • A true Desert Island Disc – 5 stars: “…this record stands as their greatest triumph… its classic status cannot be denied.”
  • If you’re a fan of The Buffalo Springfield, this early pressing from 1967 surely belong in your collection
  • The complete list of titles from 1967 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with less of an accent on morbidity and more on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. This band’s second and third albums are both good examples of records many audiophiles may not know well but should.

Listen to the vocal harmonies — you can separate out all the parts much more clearly on these Hot Stamper pressings. You can really hear precisely who’s in there and what part they are playing in the vocal arrangement. I can’t remember ever hearing it sound so clear. The best copies really let you hear into the music. (more…)

Is This Bill Halverson’s Engineering Masterpiece?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

This listing for the White Hot Stamper pressing we put up years ago was written around 2007. A few points have been added since then.

When all the elements are working together as they do here, the music on Steve Stills’ first album is positively AMAZING. Until I hear something better, I’m going to have to call this Bill Halverson‘s engineering masterpiece.* Yes, on the best copies it’s that good.

*UPDATE 2024: We have now discovered something even better, an album from earlier in the same year in fact, Deja Vu.

What to Listen For

Both sides can be rich and full-bodied, as well as transparent, with lots of separation between the parts. Most copies tend to be murky, thick, and veiled. The overall sound here is airy, open, and spacious, with TONS of ambience.

Check out the sound of Booker T’s big organ solo on Love The One You’re With — you can really hear the air moving through the instrument. That’s what a Hot Stamper pressing is all about.

And that’s not all. Listen for the rosiny texture to the strings, the warmth of the midrange, and the breath in the vocals. These are all signs of a very good pressing.

The bottom end is well-defined and has substantial weight to it, something you won’t hear on most copies. They sure don’t record music that sounds like this anymore, and even if they did I doubt they could press a record from the tapes that sounds as good as this one does. That sound is gone and it shows no sign of coming back anytime soon.

We’ll keep trying to find the unbelievably rare Hot Deja Vu’s, but in the meantime all you CSN fans should consider taking a chance on one of our Stephen Stills Hot Stampers. We guarantee you’ll love it (or your money back of course).

We Can’t Get Enough Of This Stuff

Some of the most sought after records in the world, as well as the most difficult to find with top 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 now that we achieved so easily then.

(more…)

The Stills-Young Band – Long May You Run

More Stephen Stills

More Neil Young

  • An early Reprise pressing that boasts incredible Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades throughout – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • Both of these sides are richer and smoother than practically all of what we played, with lovely studio space for the band to stretch out into
  • This copy is big and clear in a way so few are, which means it’s getting the sound right in the most important areas
  • The wonderfully present and breathy vocals are a clear indication that there is simply more information on these sides than almost all the others we played in our shootout
  • If you’re a fan of these two gentleman, this title from 1976 is surely of interest (more…)

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

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Reviews and Commentaries for Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Debut

More Crosby / More Stills / More 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.)

In-Depth Track Commentary

Side One

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young? Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with bad midrange reproduction — like most of them — is a worthless record.

(more…)

Buffalo Springfield – Last Time Around

More Buffalo Springfield

  • Relaxed, rich and tubey, yet clear, this is the kind of sound you always wanted from The Buffalo Springfield but had no way to hear, until now
  • Some of the best songs the band ever wrote are right here: I Am A Child, Kind Woman and too many more to list
  • If Buffalo Springfield Again deserves a Five Star rating then Last Time Around does too – it’s equally brilliant, and a real Desert Island Disc for yours truly

These two sides are relaxed, rich and tubey, giving you exactly what you would expect from a Top Quality pressing — without the noise, veiling and distortion that you’re used to hearing on the copies you picked up locally, or the one you mistreated back in the day (didn’t we all?).

When you get hold of the right copy and know how to clean it right, you find that some of these pressings are a damn sight better than the most audiophiles think they are.

The kind of MIDRANGE MAGIC on this pressing let us hear into the music in a way we (and you too I’m guessing) never imagined was possible.

Most copies have no bass, no real top, and are compressed so badly they sound more like cardboard than vinyl. But not this copy. It breaks the mold, revealing to the world (well, our world anyway — the world at Better Records) that those badly recorded Buffalo Springfield records from the ’60s weren’t so badly recorded after all.

(more…)

Listening in Depth to Replay

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

We stopped doing shootouts for this album many years ago after running into too many mediocre-at-best if not downright awful sounding copies. These notes are from about ten years ago.

Replay is a very handy record for setting your VTA. The end of Shadow Captain has loud vocals and punchy bass, which are a bit difficult to reproduce. (Forget trying to get this song to sound good if you don’t have an exceptionally good copy.) 

The next song is To The Last Whale, which starts with Nash and Crosby’s multitracked voices in a big hall. With the correct VTA, their voices should sound silky and sweet. If your arm is too far down in the back, they will get a bit dull. Too high, and they will lose that breathy, “fluffy” quality.

And once you get their voices to sound just right, make sure the ending of Shadow Captain is still punchy and dynamic.

Side One

Carry On 

A crappy remix, with added guitar, ugh. (more…)

Deja Vu in (Awful Sounding) Mono Sells for $1200 and People Complain About Our Prices?

More on the Subject of Hot Stamper Pricing

A mono copy of Deja Vu (which no doubt sounds terrible; I had one once) went for $1200 on ebay a few years back!

Oh, but it’s an auction, so I guess that makes it all right. The seller didn’t set the price, the market did.

But the market sets our prices too.

We can’t sell a record for more than what our customers are willing to pay. What exactly is the difference?

Man, I sure would love to get $4k+ for one of our killer Hot Stamper pressings of Deja Vu. I guarantee our copy sounds a whole lot better than the one that sold on ebay.

And the music is the same, right? There is no mono mix, so anyone with a mono switch can hear the record in mono if they wanted to. But why do that? The stereo sound is phenomenal on the best copies!

So what did you get for your additional three thousand dollars?

A nice record to put on the shelf.

Which you could get from us for three thousand dollars less.

(more…)

Deja Vu – This Classic Records Knockoff Is Not the Answer, But We Have One

Letters and Commentaries for Deja Vu

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another Classic Records rock LP badly mastered for the benefit of audiophiles looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

If you bought the Classic Record Heavy Vinyl pressing of Deja Vu, I hope you know how badly Classic Records ripped you off.

If you feel disrespected, you should. They took your money and gave you nothing of real value for it. The right CD (not the current one, that’s for damn sure) is dramatically better sounding than their vinyl reissue.

On the other hand, 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 records like those remastered by Classic Records.

We only want to play good sounding records, and most Classic Records, including this title, are definitely not good sounding, not by our standards anyway.

Records Are in a Sorry State – Here’s What You Can Do About It

It’s a sad state that we currently find ourselves in, but is it really any different than it used to be? Audiophiles used to like half-speeds, they used to like Japanese pressings, they used to like direct to disc recordings with questionable sound and even more questionable music.

Now they like SACDs, Heavy Vinyl and 45s. If you ask me it’s the same old wine in a different bottle.

(more…)

Extracting the Midrange Magic of Buffalo Springfield Again

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Buffalo Springfield Available Now

So many copies of this album sound so bad and play so poorly that most audiophiles have given up by now and written it off as a lost cause.

But we didn’t. We kept at it. Our main motivation? The music.

Extracting the midrange magic from a album like this should be the goal of every right-thinking audiophile.

Who cares what’s on the TAS Super Disc List? I want to play the music that I love, not because it sounds good, but because I love it.

And if the only way to find good sounding copies of typically poorly-mastered, beat-to-death records such as this one is to go through a big pile of them, well then, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.

(more…)

Music Does the Driving

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

As a budding audiophile I went out of my way to acquire any piece of equipment that could make these records from the ’70s (the decade of my formative music-buying years) sound better than the gear I was using. It’s the challenging recordings by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as scores of other pop and rock artists from the era, that drove my pursuit of higher quality audio, starting all the way back in high school.

And here I am — here we are — still at it, forty years later, because the music still sounds fresh and original, and the pressings that we find get better and better with each passing year.

That kind of progress is proof that we’re doing it right. It’s a good test for any audiophile. If you are actively and seriously pursuing this hobby, perhaps as many as nine out of ten non-audiophile pressings in your collection should sound better with each passing year.

As your stereo improves, not to mention your critical listening skills, the shortcomings of some of them will no doubt become more apparent. For the most part, however, with continual refinements and improvements to your system and room, as well as cleaning techniques, vintage pressings will continue to sound better the longer you stay active in the hobby.

That’s what makes it fun to play old records: They just keep getting better!

(more…)