Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

We did not care for the newly remastered version of Houses of the Holy. It badly lacks the kind of mastering that Robert Ludwig brought to the sound, and by that we mean lots of lovely tubes in the mastering chain.

What tube equipment he used and how he used it is something we have been researching for years now, but rather than go down that rabbit hole for the moment, let’s just say the Tubey Magic that is all over the original cuttings of the album is hard to find on the new one, and that means it’s missing a quality that makes Houses of the Holy one of the most luscious audiophile listening experiences one can have, even for those of us who long ago gave up on tube equipment.

The notes for side one, track one (The Song Remains the Same) and track three (Over the Hills and Far Away), read:

• Blary, but not as awful as I expected
• Dry, top end is bright, big though

The notes for side two, tracks one (Dancing Days) and three (No Quarter), read:

• A bit thick, tonally OK
• Less space around the low end

Tubes are what the doctor ordered, precisely the medicine that was needed to cure many of this pressing’s problems, but tubes are not what Jimmy Page and his engineer, John Davis, brought to the project, and more’s the pity. Any good domestic original will show you exactly what is wrong with the sound of this version in under two minutes.

If I only had two minutes, I would go straight to the opening guitar strums of The Rain Song. When those are wrong, and it should only take a few strums to hear it, what would be the point of going on?

Once you identify the problem, especially a problem as big as a lack of tubes on an album that lives and dies by its Tubey Magic, you can find other weak points simply by applying some basic logic.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar sound to die for? That’s what you hear at the start of The Rain Song on the best copies.

If it’s as wrong as this pressing is wrong, you probably just saved yourself a lot of time misspent cataloging the records strengths and weaknesses.

Once you know how bright Robert Plant’s voice is EQ’d on the Classic Records pressing remastered by Bernie Grundman in 2000, all you need to do is find any track where he is singing and you can instantly hear what’s wrong with Classic’s remaster.

There are a lot of tracks with Plant singing, eight by my count, and none of them are tolerable unless you have a couple of nice thick blankets to throw over your speakers and some other room to listen from.

Ranking the Three We’ve Played

To date we have listened to the Page remasters of the first album, II and Houses. Houses is the worst of the three, the first album ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack, and Led Zeppelin II is clearly the best, although all three fall well short of just how shockingly good our Shootout Winning pressings of Zep’s albums can be.

What shocked us about the sound of the Led Zeppelin II that Geoff Edgers first brought over to me to audition in our studio was how big, dynamic, present and alive it was. It sounded like a real record, not one of these remastered wannabes.

It was simply not part of our experience to play a Heavy Vinyl pressing with those qualities.

We’d heard hundreds of them that were small, flat, compressed, veiled and lifeless, but big, dynamic, present and alive were qualities we’d only experienced when playing the carefully cleaned, properly mastered, specially curated pressings we sell as Hot Stampers.

In fact, those are some of the very qualities that confer the status of Hot Stamper to a given record during a shootout. That’s exactly what we’re listening for.

More on Zep II

You may enjoy the various writeups we’ve published for the newly-remastered Led Zeppelin II, starting in early 2023:

• Jimmy Page Remasters a Classic

Geoff Edgers, the writer for the Washington Post investigating the world of audiophiles, visited me in 2021 to hear what this crazy Hot Stamper thing was all about. [1]

He brought with him a number of records to hear on our reference system, including the 2014 remaster of Led Zeppelin II (excellent), the remaster of Brothers in Arms that Chris Bellman cut, released in 2021 (also excellent, review to come), and last and definitely least, the pricey Craft Recordings remaster by Bernie Grundman of Lush Life (astonishingly bad, review coming).

• Jimmy Page Remasters a Classic, Updated

A customer who bought one of our Hot Stampers was sent the Page remaster, free of charge of course. He wrote us a nice letter telling us all about what a thrill it was to hear such an amazing record — the original, not the reissue — and we made the following comment to him about the shootout he said he was going to do.

• Jimmy Page Remasters a Classic, Part III

One of our customers did his own comparison with two pressings of the album he had on hand.

Below you will find links to other records with the same problems as this new version of Houses. Audiophiles should consider avoiding these titles, especially those that are pressed on premium-priced Heavy Vinyl. (The new Zep records Page produced are cheap, so at least they represent some kind of value for money, unlike those produced by this guy, in which every nickel you paid is money down the drain.)

These are some of the pressings we’ve played with dry sound

These are some of the pressings we’ve played bright sound

These are some of the pressings we’ve played that lacked Tubey Magic