DESCRIPTION:
Original Reprise Records #1065

Debut 2/5/1972
Peaked at #1 for ONE week on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.

This is the original hit version mono mix.

For myself personally, hearing this record is an instant transport back to High School (Middletown, NJ Class of '74) ! So if you are from my class, please add a comment.

Here is a copy of an article courtesy of "Wired" magazine:
WHY NEIL YOUNG HATES MP3's, AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
Neil Young is right: Those songs on your iPhone do sound like crap, and it's time we demand better-sounding alternatives for our digital music.

Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference Tuesday, the outspoken musician expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the MP3 format and called for an end-to-end reboot of the consumer digital audio ecosystem, from file formats to playback devices.

Young's big beef: Digital music files download quickly, but suffer a significant loss in quality. Bitrates for most tracks on iTunes average 256kbps AAC audio encoding, which is drastically inferior to the quality of recorded source material in almost every case. By Young's estimation, CDs offer only 15 percent of the recording information contained on the master tracks. Convert that CD-quality audio to MP3 or AAC, and you've lost a great deal of richness and complexity.

"My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years," Young said. "We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it's degrading our music, not improving."

Young is giving a popular voice to a problem that audiophiles, recording artists and even careful listeners have long felt — that the MP3s in your iTunes library don't do the original recordings justice. They're not as good as the CD version, and far inferior to an analog source like a high-quality vinyl pressing or original master tapes. But for most of us, MP3s are good enough.

"Steve Jobs was a digital pioneer, but when he went home, he listened to vinyl." — Neil Young
But MP3s weren't good enough for Steve Jobs. According to Young, even Jobs himself wasn't satisfied with the sound quality of the iPod. The late Apple CEO, famously a music-lover and audiophile, preferred to listen to vinyl records instead of digital files. Young's anecdote underscores what music geeks have been saying for a decade: The iPod isn't an audiophile device, and hardware and software have reached the point where we can build something better.

Until that mythical device arrives, you can achieve a level of audio quality that both Neil Young and your snotty friend with the $20,000 stereo can get behind. You'll have to sniff around a little to find the files, and you'll have to invest in special software and hardware to listen to them. It's all a matter of how far up the quality ladder — and down the audiophile rabbit hole — you want to go.

Here's a range of options, from the lowest rung to the highest.

MP3 and AAC — If quality... (had to cut out a lot of text to fit the YouTube space allotment)
For more info, visit the DSD-Guide website.

Vinyl — In Tuesday's rant, Neil Young let slip the surprising fact that Steve Jobs preferred to listen to vinyl around the house, leading us to believe that even the man credited with spearheading the digital music revolution was unhappy with the results.

Whether a vinyl copy sounds better than a digital copy is one of the oldest debates among audiophiles. The truth is influenced by a number of factors.

First, there's the source material — the tracks the band laid down in the studio, and what medium they used to capture the performance. Was it analog tape? Then a vinyl pressing of that performance will probably sound better than a CD. Was it a laptop recording at 24-bits? Then a high-resolution digital copy can equal the quality of the source. Second, how good is the pressing? A clean, 200-gram vinyl disc sounds vastly superior to a thin, flimsy disc, even when the same source material is used. Third, there's your equipment. Steve Jobs' stereo was probably pretty kick-ass. How good is yours?

It's likely Steve and Neil were reminiscing about the classics — The Beatles, old Dylan, recordings that were cut to analog tape. In those cases, a quality vinyl record would sound better.

If that's the level of quality Neil is striving for, it's attainable. The hardware exists, the software exists, and the file formats exist. But the details of how everything fits together are still murkier than those MP3s of Harvest Moon you found on Napster.

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