Bill Halverson, Engineer -rev/com

What Track Here Would Be Right at Home on David Crosby’s First Album?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Graham Nash Available Now

Our last shootout for this album took place in 2021. I wish we could keep the record in stock but finding the right stampers these days is not easy.

Still, as a favorite album of mine, I listen to the album regularly, just not on vinyl. Both the standard CD and the cassette I have sound right to me, sounding very much like the original record.

Recently I was playing the album and heard a song that sounded an awful lot like it might have been produced by the same team that recorded David Crosby’s first album, If Only I Could Remember My Name.

If you’re up for it, listen to the Crosby, then play the Nash and see if you can spot it. Feel free to leave your impressions in the comments section below.

Digging Deeper

Songs for Beginners is one of those albums that made me want to dig deeper into audio. After every improvement I managed to make to the system, Songs for Beginners would be one of the records that I would play (at very high volume) to see what changes I had brought about.

All the best changes — the ones I kept — always made the album sound better than I had last heard it. Over the course of decades the sound became amazingly good, a true Demo Disc that belonged in the company of Tea for the Tillerman or Dark Side of the Moon.

Back in the 70s and the 80s, not so much later as I had found plenty of other tough test discs by then, it helped me dramatically improve the playback quality of my system, which, to be honest, had a very long way to go, although I sure didn’t know that at the time. I thought it sounded great.

Early on in the history of our track by track breakdowns, written in order to aid listeners in testing their stereos and the other copies of the record they might own, we did a breakdown for the album which you can read here.

If you can’t find a nice original, whatever you do, don’t buy the awful Classic Records pressing of the album. They ruined it.

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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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Listening in Depth to So Far

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

This is a very difficult record to find with proper mastering (and good vinyl, ouch!). It seems that all of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s albums are that way. The average domestic pressing rarely even hints at how well recorded this band really was (and the imports are even worse — we’ve never heard one that didn’t sound dubby, veiled and compressed).

In my experience not even one out of ten LPs sounds right; I put the figure at one out of twenty. Most of them are shrill, dull, grainy, flat, opaque, harsh and in varying degrees suffer from every other mastering and pressing malady known to man.

But the best ones have some tracks in superb sound. When you hear the Hot Stampers for records like this you will simply be AMAZED. If you’ve ever heard a really good If Only I Could Remember My Name, an album that CAN be found with proper mastering, that should give you some idea of how good the first two albums can sound.

Side One

Déjà Vu

When you get a good copy of this album, this song sounds like it was lifted right off of a Hot Stamper copy of Deja Vu itself. It’s so rich and Tubey Magical you’d swear it couldn’t get any better. Huge amounts of deep bass. Acoustic guitars that ring for days. Midrange magic to die for. Not many of them sound this way, unfortunately.

If I could indulge in some more MoFi and Half-Speed bashing for a moment, the bass “solo” at the end of this song is a great test for bass definition. The notes are relatively high, and it’s easy for them to sound blurred and wooly. The MoFi, like virtually all Half-Speed mastered records, has a problem with bass definition. If you own the MoFi, listen for how clearly defined the notes are at the end of this track. Then play any other copy, either of So Far or Deja Vu. It’s a pretty safe bet that the bass will be much more articulate. I know how bad the MOFI is in this respect. Rarely do “normal” records have bass that bad.

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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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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.

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 – “Definitely a very and unexpected high quality.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Stephen Stills Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

Received the LPs today from Stephen Stills and Santana. Definitely a very and unexpected high quality.

I grew up with these LPs. Unfortunately these can no longer be played because of the tobacco of the joints that were left behind.

Our store sells and promotes analog. We sell turntables such as SME, REED, Dohmann and Techdas, etc. http://www.rhapsody.nl

I will definitely promote you to our customers.

Harry

Thanks, Harry, for writing.

These are some great albums, they would sound killer on good equipment and these are the kinds of records that need to be played in stereo showrooms, not the audiophile crap that one hears so much.

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

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

Detail may be the Holy Grail to some audiophiles, but listening for the details in a recording can be a trap we too easily fall into unless we are on our guard.

Tonal balance is the key.

Without correct tonal balance, no judgments about the details of the recording have any real value. 

A case in point: As good as the Classic Heavy Vinyl pressing is, the guitar at the opening of Helplessly Hoping tells you everything you need to know about what’s missing. The guitar on the better Hot Stamper domestic copies has a transparency and harmonic integrity that cannot be found on Classic’s version.

The Classic Records pressing gets the tonal balance right, but their guitar lacks the subtlety and harmonic resolution of the real thing.

I’m laboring here to avoid the word “detail,” since many audiophiles like bright, phony sounding records because of all their wonderful detail. Patricia Barber’s albums come to mind, along with scores of audiophile pressings. 

The MoFi guys and the CD guys are constantly falling into the trap of being impressed by the phony detail in some recordings.

The solution is to get the sound tonally balanced first, then see how much detail you have left.

Detail is not the end-all and be-all of audio. Those who think it is have systems that are sure to fall apart at louder levels. If the sound of your system on your best pressings doesn’t get better as it gets louder, you are failing one of the most important tests in all of audio, the turn up your volume test.

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Letter of the Week – “The instruments fill my room like they would in a live performance.”

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, 

I have really been enjoying the Neil Young “After The Gold Rush” and CSN&Y “So Far.” They are like the “Workingman’s Dead” LP. Just a thrill to hear. The instruments on “After The Gold Rush” fill my room like they would in a live performance. Addictive.

AJ

Dear AJ,

Addiction is the name of the game!

If you’re an audiophile who is not addicted to good sound and good music, you may not be one for long.

And if you have been in this game for a very long time like I have, you have no doubt met self-identified audiophiles with systems that haven’t been improved in twenty years, and appear to be rarely used.

I like to think those are the audiophiles who own lots of audiophile records, the ones that are designed to show off stereo equipment and typically hold little interest from a musical standpoint.

The TAS Super Disc List is full of these records. We have no use for most of them and we suspect our customers don’t either.

Audiophiles with vintage pressings of real music rarely abandon the hobby in my experience.

And if you have Hot Stamper pressings, why would you ever give up on hearing music that sounds as good as our records sound?

Thanks for your letter.

TP

Letter of the Week – “For the next three hours, I spun disc after disc, to their delight.”

More Raves for the Phenomenal Sound of White Hot Stamper Pressings

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

Hey Tom, 

Story for you — last Saturday evening, a designer of a new world-famous tonearm, the owner of an elite high-end audio salon in California and I met for dinner with a well-known reviewer for one of the big audiophile rags, then went back to one of their houses to listen to records I had been asked to bring.

About 90% of the two dozen records I had selected were White Hot Stamper versions of classic rock staples.

For the next three hours, I spun disc after disc, to their delight.

Particular faves included Elvis Costello’s “My Aim Is True,” Led Zeppelin II, 10CC’s “The Original Soundtrack,” CSNY’s “Deja Vu,” and Chicago’s first LP.

Bill

Bill,

That sounds like a great way to spend an evening, playing killer copies of world class Demo Disc recordings! I would loved to have been there.

Without exception, these are five of our most beloved records, records we have been obsessed with since I first heard them all those years ago.

And of course we will never read a word about pressings with Hot Stampers, from this or any other demonstration, in one of the big audiophile rags. We are bad for their business. Their Heavy Vinyl advertisers would throw a fit. They know what we have to say about their shoddy products.

I guess there might just be something attractive about having the best sounding pressings in the world and being able to keep it amongst the small number of music loving audiophiles who are “in the know.”

But it would be nice if everyone could hear it for themselves.

Thanks for making a good start.

TP

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