More Grateful Dead
More Hippie Folk Rock
- The acoustic guitars are magical on this copy, and you won’t believe how wonderfully breathy and sweet these guys’ voices sound
- American Beauty is one of Stephen Barncard‘s greatest recording achievements – the richness and clarity are really something here
- A 5 star Top 100 album – “A companion piece to the luminous Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty is an even stronger document of the Grateful Dead’s return to their musical roots. American Beauty remains the Dead’s studio masterpiece.”
- A permanent resident of our Top 100 rock and pop list — no other album by the band is as well recorded
- Roughly 100 other listings for the best sounding album by an artist or group can be found here.
This is a longtime Better Records favorite for both music and sound. For those of you who love acoustic guitar-driven folk songs — we call it hippie folk rock — you should find a lot to like about the sound of this album.
Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the best Hot Stamper pressings. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).
All the Elements Finally Come Together
All of the elements necessary to take this music to an entirely new level are here, my friends: smooth, sweet vocals; rich, meaty bass; an open and airy top end; top-notch presence and so forth. The sound is so spacious and transparent that you can easily pick out each of the instruments and follow them over the course of the songs.
You could choose any track you wanted to and find lovely sound here, but I’d recommend “Ripple” and “Attics Of My Life” for starters. Most copies suffer from a glaring lack of highs, but just listen to the ride cymbals on this one to find out that the top end is still alive and well here.
The Dead At Their Best
The crowning glory of the Grateful Dead, their MASTERPIECE. Albums like this come along once in a band’s life — if they’re lucky. This is the zenith of the Grateful Dead. Workingman’s Dead is a good album. American Beauty is a great one.
If you don’t have a great-sounding copy yet, it’s time to get on the bus. Stephen Barncard is the recording engineer responsible for this album, Deja Vu, Brewer, and Shipley’s Tarkio, and a host of other amazingly rich, sweet and natural, mostly acoustic recordings that stand head and shoulders above the bulk of their contemporaries. American Beauty is one of them.
