*Favorite Engineers

Dave Hassinger Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Dave Hassinger’s Recordings

Reviews and Commentaries for Dave Hassinger’s Recordings

More of Our Favorite Engineers

“‘Satisfaction’ was [mixed] on four tracks,” Hassinger recalls. “That was a big thing.” He adds:

“When I first arrived at RCA there were three tracks. When it went to four tracks we were all thinking. What are we going to do with the extra track?”

(RCA) wasn’t as funky as Chess obviously but it was more commercial. And (Dave Hassinger) really… he had a good ear, he’d get good sounds, and we experimented with more instruments… And he’d always get good sounds so we’d always get a good take at 3 or 4 shots at a song. 

Bill Wyman

As a staff engineer at RCA’s Hollywood studios in the 1960s, David Hassinger worked on a number of important and classic recordings. The most famous of these, perhaps, are mid-’60s tracks that the Rolling Stones recorded in Hollywood, including the entirety of their 1966 album, Aftermath. They also include, however, the first two Jefferson Airplane albums, along with efforts by Sam Cooke, Love, the Monkees, the Byrds (their first attempt at “Eight Miles High,” re-recorded later for official release), Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and others. Hassinger also attempted to establish himself as a producer in the late ’60s, with limited success, most notably with the Electric Prunes and the first Grateful Dead album. (more…)

Fred Plaut Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

More Recordings by Fred Plaut

Reviews and Commentaries for the Recordings of Fred Plaut

Fred Plaut is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers. Click on the link to find our in-stock Fred Plaut engineered or produced albums, along with plenty of our famous commentaries. 

Frederick “Fred” Plaut was a recording engineer and amateur photographer. He was employed by Columbia Records during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, eventually becoming the label’s chief engineer.

Plaut engineered sessions for what would result in many of Columbia’s most famous albums, including the original cast recordings of South Pacific, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, jazz LPs Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, Time Out by Dave Brubeck, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty by Charles Mingus.

Wikipedia


Further Reading

Eddie Kramer Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums Engineered by Eddie Kramer Available Now

Eddie Kramer is one of our favorite recording and mixing engineers.

Click on the links below to see our supply of Eddie Kramer engineered or produced albums, along with plenty of our famous commentaries.

Many can be found in our rock and pop Top 100 list of best sounding albums with the best music (limited to titles that we can actually find sufficient copies of with which to do our Hot Stamper shootouts).

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Ron Nevison Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

More Recordings Engineered by Ron Nevison

More of Our Favorite Engineers

Ron Nevison is one of our favorite engineers. He recorded Bad Company’s debut, a Top 100 album for us, as well as Straight Shooter. In 1973 he engineered Quadrophenia, taking the reins away from Glyn Johns after his success with the amazing Who’s Next.

1975 saw him working on the sprawling mess that turned into Physical Graffiti.

Bad Company was one of RON NEVISON’S early engineering jobs. The year before (1973) he had been behind the board at Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio for Quadrophenia, one of the best sounding Who albums we know of and a longtime member of our Top 100 (as is this album). He also knocked it out of the park on Bad Company’s follow-up release, 1975’s Straight Shooter.

If you have top quality copies of any of them you should be able to recognize the qualities they all seem to have in common. This guy definitely knew how to get The Big Rock Sound onto analog tape.

Our job here at Better Records is simply to find you the very special pressings that actually reproduce all the energy and rock and roll firepower that Nevison captured. It ain’t easy but we don’t mind doing it — these are clearly some of the All Time Great Rock Albums of the ’70s (or any other decade you care to name) and we just never get tired of hearing them.

He went on to do lots of the biggest selling monster rock albums of the ’80s, but The ’80s Sound has never held much appeal for us, which is of course why you find so few recordings from that era on our site, silk purses, sow’s ears and all that.

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Stephen Barncard Is One of Our Favorite Engineers

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STEPHEN BARNCARD is one of our favorite producers and recording / mixing engineers. Click on his name to find our in-stock Stephen Barncard engineered albums, along with some of our commentaries for same.

Barncard is the recording engineer on Tarkio, one of our All Time Favorite Records. He’s also the man behind one of the ten best sounding rock recordings we have ever played, If I Could Only Remember My Name

Typical Notes for If I Could Only Remember My Name (more…)