{"product_id":"crosb4ways_2604","title":"Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - 4 Way Street - Super Hot Stamper","description":"\u003cp\u003eIf you want to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rock out live in your listening room, this copy will let you do it. It's not easy to find good sound on even one side of this album, let alone all four!\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese vintage Atlantic Stereo pressings have the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to \"see\" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, these are the records for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- \u003ci\u003ethis sound\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eThe Naked Sound of Live Music\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe song \"Triad,\" just to cite one example, presents us with a lone David Crosby and his acoustic guitar. It's as real sounding as anything I've ever heard from the band. Listening to that natural guitar tone brings home the fact that their studio recordings (and studio recordings in general) are processed and degraded compared to what the microphones must have picked up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis live album gives you the \"naked\" sound of the real thing -- the real voices and the real guitars and the real everything else, in a way that would never happen again. (Later CSN albums are mostly dreadful. Fortunately, later Neil Young albums, e.g., Zuma, are often Demo Discs of the highest quality.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSide two, our favorite of the four, gives you authentically Live Neil Young from 1970; no other live Neil Young record contained material from this era until the recently released Live at Massey Hall album (1971), which is superb and belongs in your collection on CD. (I admit to not having heard the vinyl.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat The Best Sides Of 4 Way Street Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe most Tubey Magic, without which you have \u003ci\u003ealmost\u003c\/i\u003e nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in \u003ca href=\"\/search?q=tag:%221971%22\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e1971\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNatural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eTransparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNo doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. \u003ci\u003ePlaying these records is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above,\u003c\/i\u003e and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find pressings that sound as good as these two do.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eThe Best Sound\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOur best copies are big, clear, present, and dynamic. They show you what few copies can: how well-recorded the album is. Bill Halverson did a great job but you have to work your tail off to find a copy that does his brilliant engineering justice. Sad, isn't it?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSuper high rez too -- listen to how clear the crowd noises are. Yet on the better copies, the sound is immediate, with layers of depth and space around all the instruments and voices (and crowd members even!).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd last but not least, you want a copy with \u003ci\u003eenergy\u003c\/i\u003e. It's a big deal here at Better Records. We want to feel something when we play these records. You will feel it when you play this copy, that we can guarantee.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat We're Listening For On 4 Way Street\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eEnergy\u003c\/strong\u003e for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThen: \u003cstrong\u003epresence and immediacy\u003c\/strong\u003e. The vocals aren't \"back there\" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eThe Big Sound\u003c\/strong\u003e comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThen \u003cstrong\u003etransient information\u003c\/strong\u003e -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTight punchy bass\u003c\/strong\u003e -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNext: \u003cstrong\u003etransparency\u003c\/strong\u003e -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eExtend the top and bottom\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003ci\u003evoila\u003c\/i\u003e, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eWhat To Watch Out For\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf the singers get hard and shrill in the louder passages, then what you have is a pretty typical pressing. Add grit and grain, smeared transients, opacity, surface noise and a lack of weight down low and you'll know why it takes us years to find enough copies to shoot out -- because this is what most pressings sound like.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs you have surely read on the site by now, this band has put out more bad pressings of good recordings than practically any I can think of. Here is an excerpt from our review of their first album that discusses the issue in more depth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cblockquote\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e95% of all the pressings of this album I've ever played have been disappointing. They're almost always wrong, each in their own way of course. Some are dull, some are shrill, some are aggressive, some have no bass -- every mastering fault you can imagine can be heard on one copy or another of this record. The bottom line? If you want to buy them and try them from your local record store, plan on spending hundreds of dollars and putting in years of frustrating effort, perhaps with little to show for it in the end. This is one tough nut to crack; it's best to know that going in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/blockquote\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eBill Halverson\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you get a good copy of this album you're sure to hear what we heard -- that this is truly one of the great live rock albums. It has the big rock sound that we go crazy for at Better Records. The better pressings, the ones that are full-bodied and smooth, let you crank the levels and reproduce the album good and loud the way it was meant to be heard.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt's clearly one of Bill Halverson's engineering triumphs, along with Cream's Goodbye album, Deja Vu and Steve Stills' debut.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eVinyl Condition\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThose of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIf you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51610089390376,"sku":"crosb4ways","price":249.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0257\/3415\/2295\/files\/crosb4ways.jpg?v=1768325544","url":"https:\/\/better-records.com\/products\/crosb4ways_2604","provider":"Better Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}