Best Of The 70s Music

Actually Finding Good 70s Compilations Isn't Hard If You Know What To Look For

The problem most people run into when hunting for best-of collections from the 1970s is that the term "best of" means almost nothing in practice. Record labels pulled together these compilations at breakneck speed, often in a matter of days, and they treated the source material like it was disposable. You will hear remastered tracks that have been crushed flat, tracks that skip around chronologically because someone thought a single from 1974 made more sense in track three than where it originally appeared, and a few bonus tracks tacked on that were never meant to be part of the same conversation as the album cuts. I spent several years chasing down proper pressings for a personal archive and learned pretty quickly that the standard CD reissues from the late 90s were not worth much. The 1996 Universal reissue wave was basically a mass-market operation. They took the original multitrack tapes, ran them through an equalizer that boosted the highs aggressively to make them sound "brighter" on cheap speakers, and called it a day. The dynamic range got hammered. A lot of the bass disappeared. These versions sound fine if you are just throwing something on in the background, but they lose everything that made the original mixes work.

Best Of The 70s Music

The way I approach this now is to start with what artist or label catalog I want to go through, then I look up the original release year of each album on discogs.com before I buy anything. Discogs gives me the matrix numbers stamped into the runout grooves of vinyl pressings, which tells me exactly which pressing plant made it and when. A Matrix number like "PYRE 11789-1A/2A" means something completely different than "PYRE 11789-5B/6B." The earlier variant is usually closer to the original mix engineer's intent. For compiled best-of sets, the real quality comes from checking who did the mastering. If the person listed is someone like Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio or Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering, the chances of it being decent are good. Those engineers actually know how to handle vintage tape transfers. If the credit goes to just "Sony Digital" or "Universal Remastered," do not bother. Here is an edge case I ran into that took me forever to figure out. I was looking for the original Fleetwood Mac self-titled album, the 1975 one with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Every compilation I found used the 1995 remaster because that was the version Universal had readily available. But the original 1975 mix on the Blue Thumb label had a completely different balance. The acoustic guitars were forward, the vocals sat back more, and the whole thing had a warmth that the remaster flattened out completely. I ended up tracking down a 1975 Blue Thumb pressing on vinyl through a dealer in Ohio. It cost me about forty dollars plus shipping, but hearing those original mixes the way they were actually meant to sound was worth every penny. I still use that pressing today.

Streaming services are another minefield for 70s music. Spotify and Apple Music both compress their audio, and the bitrate varies depending on your plan. If you are on the free tier, you are getting maybe 128 kbps, which sounds muddy on anything other than phone speakers. Even the highest tier caps out at 256 kbps AAC, which is fine for casual listening but strips away a lot of the subtle detail that was captured on analog tape. I switched to Tidal HiFi and Qobuz because they offer FLAC files at 16-bit/44.1 kHz or better, which is the actual CD-quality format. The difference is noticeable if you have decent headphones or a proper stereo system. Physical media still wins for this era. Vinyl from the 1970s was pressed at a lower rotational speed and with wider grooves than modern pressings, which means the needle can actually track the full frequency range that was recorded. CDs from the 80s and early 90s are often better than the CD reissues from the 2000s. The early digital converters had less processing power and were forced to be more honest with the source material because they could not apply as many corrections. A Japanese Pressed CD from 1987 is usually a better sonically than a 2001 remaster. One thing most people miss when building a collection is that some of the best 70s music came from European labels that never got proper reissues in the US. Bands like Can, Neu!, and Tangerine Dream were released by Virgin Records in Germany, but the American distribution was handled by different companies with different master tapes. The German pressing of Neu! Volume 1 sounds nothing like the US import. The German version has a deeper bass response and the drums hit harder because they used a different mixing board at the original studio. I found this out after accidentally buying both versions and playing them back to back. The US import sounded thin and boxed in by comparison.

If you are just starting out, here is what I would do. Pick one genre or label from the 70s and focus on that first instead of jumping around. Thekrautrock. The Motown catalogue. The Warner Bros. roster. Go through their releases in order. Buy the original pressings or the closest reissue you can find. Check discogs for matrix numbers before purchasing. Avoid any compilation that does not list a mastering engineer. Use a service like Qobuz to stream in high resolution while you wait for physical copies to arrive. Do not buy the 1996 Sony remasters. They are everywhere and they sound terrible, and there is no reason to add them to your collection. The 70s produced an enormous amount of well-recorded music because the studios at the time were operating at peak analog technology. The tape machines, the console designs, the room acoustics — it was all mature. Engineers like Alan Parsons, Roy Thomas Baker, and Phil Ramone had figured out how to capture performances that still sound rich decades later. The compilation albums sold well enough that labels kept going back to the same masters over and over, which is why so many versions of the same track exist with different levels of quality. Being selective about which version you pull from matters more than most people realize. I keep about two hundred vinyl records from the 70s in my collection now, and maybe forty CDs. The vinyl is where I get the best sound, and the CDs are only the ones that have no vinyl equivalent or where the CD was mastered from the original analog tapes before any digital remastering happened. Everything else I stream or leave alone. The process takes time, but it saves money in the long run because you stop buying the same mediocre versions repeatedly.