Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival Available Now
Another entry that falls under the heading of
What’s the big idea?
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.
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