Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills and Nash Available Now
Now with bonus CD Advice.
Although millions of copies of CSN’s first album were sold, so few were mastered and pressed well, and so many mastered and pressed poorly, that only a ridiculously small number of Hot Stamper copies have ever actually made it to the site. A couple dozen would be my guess, compared to, for example, the Beatles albums, many of which have sold by the hundreds. To this day they are difficult to keep in stock, I assume because our customers seem to really like them.)
We wish that were not the case — we love the album — but the copies we know to have the potential for Hot Stamper sound are just not sitting around in the record bins waiting for us to scoop them up.
But of course that was never the really the case even back in the good old days, as the reissue we like was simply not produced in significantly large numbers the way the originals were. Finding the right reissues was always a matter of luck, with the odds stacked very much against us. I don’t remember ever finding more than one copy with the killer stampers in a single year.
Warning
Whatever you do, don’t waste your money on the Joe Gastwirt-mastered CD.
It couldn’t be any more awful. (His Deja Vu is just as bad.)
In-Depth Track Commentary
Side One
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
What’s magical about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young?
Their voices of course. It’s not a trick question. They revolutionized rock music with their genius for harmony. Any good pressing must sound correct on their voices or it has no value whatsoever. A CSN record with substandard midrange reproduction — like most of them — is a worthless record.
