More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival
Another entry that falls under the heading of
Before 2008 or so we had regularly been frustrated with this band’s recordings. There were plenty of customers for their albums, but even our best Hot Stampers fell well short of the standards we set for top quality sound.
We assumed the recordings themselves were at fault.
Things started to turn around after that, judging from this bit of boilerplate at the bottom of a listing for Green River from around 2010 or so:
Many copies were gritty, some were congested in the louder sections, some never got big, some were thin and lacking the lovely analog richness of the best — we heard plenty of copies whose faults were obvious when played against two top sides such as these.
The best copies no longer to seem to have the problems we used to hear all the time.
Of course the reason I hadn’t heard the congestion and grittiness in the recording is that two things changed. (1) We found better copies of the record to play — probably, can’t say for sure, but let’s assume we did — and (2) we’ve made lots of improvements to the stereo since the last time we did the shootout.
You have to get around to doing regular shootouts for any given record in order to find out how far you’ve come, or if you’ve come any distance at all. Fortunately for us the improvements, regardless of what they might comprise or when they might have occurred, were incontrovertible. The album was now playing at a much, much higher level.
It’s yet more evidence supporting the possibility, indeed the importance, of taking full advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last ten or twenty years. [Make that thirty by now.]
Live and Learn
When Creedence’s records started to sound good, we stopped blaming those albums for being badly recorded.
It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad — or least problematical — now sound pretty darn good.
Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.
The recordings don’t change. Our ability — and yours — to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what Hot Stampers are all about.
You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing, check off the box for that title, file it alphabetically on the shelf where it goes and sleep soundly knowing that all is right with the world.
You did the right thing, you bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the real analog tape, mastered by one of the greats, the one pressed on the best vinyl, in a limited run, and on and on down the list.
When — sometimes if but usually when — the sound of the record doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it, you merely accept the fact that the recording itself must be at fault.
We did it too, more times than I care to admit.
Try It Our Way
Instead of heading toward that dead end, perhaps you should consider adopting our approach, and approach that allows you to hear those very same albums sound dramatically better than you ever thought possible. In fact, many of our customers have written to tell us what a revelation our Hot Stamper pressings of familiar albums can be.
Our approach has the added benefit of freeing up time that might otherwise be spent bitching about the unfortunate sound of so many great recordings. (Fragile is apparently not a good recording. Songs in the Key of Life is also apparently not a good recording. Who knew we could find such amazing sounding pressings made from such bad recordings?)
This in turn makes more time available for pleasurable listening to the Hot Stamper pressing you discovered on your own or the one we found for you. It’s the same process whether you do it yourself or we do it for you.
You will already own the pressing that settles the argument. Keep in mind that your pressing only settles the argument for you.
And why should they? They have never heard your copy. It would take quite a leap of faith on their part to believe that your copy sounds so much better than the one they own, when the one they own looks just like the one you own. It might even have the same catalog number, the same label, maybe even the same stampers.
But this is precisely what Hot Stampers are all about. Pressings often look the same but they most assuredly do not often sound the same.
We Can Only Do So Much
Unfortunately most of what is important in audio you have to learn to do for yourself.
We can find you the best sounding pressings; that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to play them, and learning how to listen to them, well, that’s a fair bit harder. That part takes a lifetime, at least.
This hobby is supposed to be fun. If you’ve been in it for any length of time you know that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But if you enjoy doing it at least some of the time, and you devote the proper resources to it — time and money — you will no doubt derive much more pleasure from it, especially if you use our approach.
It has worked for us and it can work for you.
This is what the revolutionary changes in audio link explains. If you haven’t taken advantage of all the newest technologies that make LP playback dramatically better than it was ten or twenty years ago, CCR’s records most likely won’t sound the way you want them to.
Trust me, there’s a world of sound lurking in the grooves of the best Creedence records that simply cannot be revealed without Walker cleaning fluids, the Talisman, Hallographs, vibration-reducing platforms, top quality front ends, big speakers pulled well out from the back wall in a treated room, and all the rest.
Our playback system is designed to play CCR’s records with all the size, weight, energy and power of live music.
We live for this kind of classic rock sound here at Better Records. We’re prepared to do whatever it takes to play records like this with maximum fidelity, secure in the knowledge that a system that can play Creedence’s records right is one that can play practically any record.
