Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now
How does the Heavy Vinyl of Harvest sound?
We have no idea. We’ve never played a copy.
Actually, that’s not true. We do have an idea.
Although we’ve never auditioned the Heavy Vinyl pressing of Harvest, we have played the newly remastered After the Gold Rush. We concluded that this is a reissue series that should hold very little appeal for audiophiles. Some excerpts from our review:
We know what the good pressings of the album sound like, we play them regularly, and this newly remastered vinyl is missing almost everything that makes the album essential to any Right Thinking Music Lover’s collection.
We can summarize the sound of this awful record in one word: boring. Since some of you may want to know more than that we’ll be happy to break it down for you a bit further.
What It Does Right
It’s tonally correct.
Can’t think of anything else…
What It Does Wrong
Where to begin?
It has no real space or ambience. When you play this record it sounds as if they must have recorded it in a heavily padded studio. Somehow the originals of After the Gold Rush, like most of Neil’s classic albums from the era, are clear, open and spacious.
Cleverly the engineers responsible for this audiophile remastering have managed to reproduce the sound of a dead studio on a record that wasn’t recorded in one.
In addition, the record never gets loud. The good pressings get very loud. They rock, they’re overflowing with energy.
And, lastly, there’s no real weight to the bottom end. The whomp factor on this new pressing is practically non-existent. The low end of the originals is huge, deep and powerful.
The Bottom Line
This new Heavy Vinyl pressing is boring beyond belief (tip of the hat to Elvis Costello there). I wouldn’t give you a nickel for it. If Neil Young actually had anything to do with it he should be ashamed of himself.
If you want a good copy of the album we have them on the site from time to time. If you can’t afford our Hot Stampers, please don’t waste your money on this one. I have an old CD from 30 years ago, and it is dramatically better than this LP.
Pass / Not Yet
We think the Heavy Vinyl pressing of After the Gold Rush is so awful that whatever supporters it may have — and there are surely some who have spoken highly of it on audiophile forums somewhere, having seen the most ridiculously bad audiophile records touted again and again — are failing utterly in this hobby in one or both of the following ways.