Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now
The founding members of CSN chose the Albert brothers to engineer this 1977 reunion.
Their most famous album is Layla. Ever heard a great sounding Layla? Me neither. Can you hear the sound of Layla in your head? That’s more or less what this album sounds like. There are better and worse Layla’s — we’ve done the shootout many times — just as there are better and worse CSNs, but we have never played amazing Demo Disc pressings of either and I doubt we ever will.
The problem with the sound cannot be “fixed” in the mastering, and here’s how we know: on either side some songs have wonderful sound — the midrange magic, the “breath of life” that makes the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album such a special listening experience — and some don’t.
That’s a recording problem.
It sounds like too many generations of tape were used on songs like Shadow Captain and Dark Star, among others.
But Just a Song Before I Go on side two can sound wonderful: rich, sweet, present and surrounded by lovely studio ambience.
So we listen for the qualities of a specific song that help us pinpoint what the best copies do well and the rest do less well and grade them accordingly, on a curve.
Animals will never sound like The Wall. You do the best you can with what you’ve got to work with.