Bill Halverson, Engineer -rev/com

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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Letter of the Week – “I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions Reissue…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sonny Rollins’s Albums Available Now

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

Dear Tom and Fred

After having had the opportunity to listen to the next batch of 7 more records, here are my observations on the now 40 records I bought from you.

First to my listening experience. After receiving the CSNY 4 Way Street and looking for my own record, I thought was a German press easy to beat I realized it was a white label promo first press and thought, oh, did I make a mistake to buy this for this kind of money from you guys, this may be a tough one to crack?

Not so, your SH Stamper clearly beat the WL promo, check!

Next up was the Miles Davis Sketches of Spain White Hot Stamper, one of my very top Miles favorites.

I did not recall that I had the six eye first press, and on side 2, with identical stampers (when your 3/3 WH show up, you do not have the time to check this but hurry :-since your WH 3/3s sell like hot cakes!).

So even more difficult to beat?? Promising start: your WH was clearly better on side 1, now to the identical stampers side 2: not as clearly but still just more transparent, better drums, less shrill on track 2, check!

But it certainly cannot get better than this 3/3 WH stamper, can it?

Next up is Sonny Rollins 3/3 WH Stamper [of Way Out West]. Hard to believe, but yes, even better than the great Miles 3/3 WHS, and I will spare you the time to comment on my 1992 Analogue Productions reissue which I always thought was quite decent.

And so it goes on…

Christian

Christian,

In less than a year you have acquired a large number of simply amazing sounding records. Congratulations.

As you point out about the stampers, you may have a pressing with the right stampers, but our copy will still beat it. How it was pressed and how it was cleaned are critical to the sound, and that is not something the stamper numbers can tell you. It’s a subject we discuss all over this blog. Here is a good place to start.

As for your 1992 Analogue Productions Heavy Vinyl remaster, I honestly don’t know how anyone can listen to a record with sound like that and consider it acceptable, or, in your words, “quite decent.” I went into the long story of the album in this commentary.

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Eric Clapton’s First Album – A Personal Favorite from 1970

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

We had a killer pressing many years ago that sounded a whole lot better than I ever thought the album could sound.

Man, what a revelation to hear an old favorite sound so amazingly spacious and sweet.

As good as the best Atco pressings can be, the early British pressings simply capture more of the Eric Clapton magic than they do. They are dramatically less gritty. Richer and sweeter too. (We’ve included some moderately helpful title-specific advice down below.)

I’ve been playing this album since I bought it in 1970, the year it came out. During my high school years (1970-1972, my rather limited record collection was made up of albums by The Beatles, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills and Nash, America, Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Chicago, James Taylor, Spirit, The Band, Loggins and Messina, Peter Frampton, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Blind Faith, Bread, and no doubt more than a few others that are lost to time.

This was the music of my youth, and although many other artists and styles of music have been added to the playlist in the ensuing decades, classic rock still makes up a substantial portion of the music I play and enjoy today.

This is no doubt the case for many of you. It’s why Classic Rock is the heart and soul of our business. Finding quiet, exceptionally good sounding pressings of Classic Rock albums is probably the hardest thing we do around here. It’s what we devote most of our resources to, and if we can be indulged a self-compliment, it’s what we do best.

Of course, having no competition to speak of is no little help in this regard. No one is even attempting to conduct the kind of record shootouts we find ourselves immersed in all week long.

And who can blame them? It’s hard to put together the layers and layers of resources necessary to pull it off. There are a great many steps a record must go through before it finds itself for sale on our site, and that means there are ten copies sitting in the backroom for every one that’s available for purchase.

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Good Horns, Probably Good Everything

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Eric Clapton Available Now

This is not your usual Clapton album, and that’s a good thing, because most Clapton albums are full of filler. Not so here — almost every song is good, and many are superb.

The sound of the horn arrangements that back almost every song on the album are key to understanding the pressing and mastering quality on any given copy.

Blary, smeary, leading-edge-challenged horns are the kiss of death on this album, as are grainy, gritty, transistory ones.

When the horns have clarity, correct tonality, plenty of space around them and a solid, full-bodied sound, probably every other instrument in the soundscape will too.

Other records with brass instruments that are good for testing can be found here.

Want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our Hot Stamper shootouts.

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

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Helplessly Hoping to Get the VTA Right

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

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 went with the much more accurate and revealing 17D, which took us to another level, documented here.

Helplessly Hoping is a wonderful song that has a lot of energy in the midrange and upper midrange which is difficult to get right. 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.

But if you’re one of the lucky few who has a good pressing of Helplessly Hoping, try tweaking your VTA adjustment and see if you aren’t able to dial it in even better than before.

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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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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 – “The goosebumps were flowing madly during the amazing Guinevere vocals.”

More of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash

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

Our good customer Michel wrote to tell us how much he likes his latest Hot Stamper pressing.

Hi Tom,

As another reviewer said… it’s Alive!!

It is so surreal to hear such beautiful warm massive lush bass while simultaneously hearing the highs so well that each of the voices are able to be clearly picked out of the soundfield.

Never have I heard this one of my very very favorite LPs in such a manner. Classic Records, MFSL, Atlantic 45, ERC can all go to hell!

This pressing I just got from you of CSN’s ‘couch’ album has brought much joy to my house. The goosebumps were flowing madly during the amazing Guinevere vocals. I was truly taken aback. My stereo gave it its all and this time it delivered.

Words just don’t do enough to explain this experience. I am still in disbelief. I bought a copy of this album from you before, and it did not float my boat….but this one really hit the spot. This NWHS is a true rare gem and now one
of my most prized LPs. It’s got it ALL.

Many thanks,

Michel

Michel,

Thanks as usual for your enthusiastic letter. We aim to please and we are glad to see we were finally able to find you the sound you were looking for.

Best, TP

P.S.

You say you are “still in disbelief.” That is exactly the state of mind an especially good record can put you in. We offer the discriminating and well-healed audiophile especially good records that have the power to do that.

The Classic Records pressing Bernie Grundman cut in the early-2000s is a nice record, it does many things right, and it’s clearly superior to every original pressing we’ve ever auditioned. However, I strongly suspect that no one playing it found themselves in “disbelief” as to the quality of the sound they were hearing, although of course I have no way of knowing that.

What I do know is that the three most important words in audio are compared to what?

Shootouts are the only way to answer that question, and that is why we encourage everyone to do as many of them as you can. You will learn more from doing shootouts than you will from any other method or approach. We tell you what we think are the best ways to do them. We leave the rest to you.

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