Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young
We award this copy’s side two our very special Four Plus A++++ grade, which is strictly limited to pressings (really, individual sides of pressings) that take a recording to a level never experienced by us before, a level we had no idea could even exist. We estimate that less than one per cent of the Hot Stamper pressings we come across in our shootouts earn this grade. You can’t get much more rare than that.
We no longer use this grade for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. Suffice to say, if you buy a White Hot Stamper pressing from us, you are getting the best sounding pressing we know to exist.
- Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.
- We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.
- Nowadays we most often place them under the general heading of breakthrough pressings. These are records that, out of the blue, revealed to us sound of such high quality that it dramatically changed our appreciation of the recording itself.
- We found ourselves asking “Who knew?” Perhaps a better question would have been “How high is up?”
This FOUR PLUS (A++++) side two boasts insane energy, size and power. Deja Vu is one of our all time favorite albums at Better Records and one that almost never sounds THIS good.
If you play this copy good and loud, and have the kind of full-range system that plays loud and clean like live music, we guarantee you will be nothing less than gobsmacked at the size and power of the sound.
Just listen to the guitars during the solos — you can really hear the sound of the pick hitting the strings. The rhythm guitars sound meaty and chunky like the best sounding copies of Zuma and After The Gold Rush.