We Was Wrong about Presence

Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Albums Available Now

My history with Led Zeppelin’s seventh album is a classic case of me mistakenly blaming the recording.

In our listings for Presence from about fifteen years ago (a lifetime in audio, at least for us) we noted:

“By the way, Royal Orleans (at the end of side one) never sounds good; it’s always grainy. Same story with the intro to Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It sounds like groove damage, but since it’s on every last one of our domestic copies (the only ones that have the potential to sound amazing in our experience) we know it has to be a pressing problem and not a problem with the individual copies. It’s a shame, but the rest of the songs here all sound amazing.”

This is no longer true, or at least the part about Nobody’s Fault But Mine being grainy or distorted isn’t, since I didn’t test Royal Orleans this time around.

I had just put in a fresh Dynavector 17d3 two days before and spent almost three hours getting the setup dialed in. In fact, it was so right when I was done that I spent the next three or four hours experimenting with room treatments.

When I was done the changes seemed to have opened up the sound and increased the transparency even further. (I went a little too far and had to dial it back a bit, but that’s not at all unusual in my experience.)

Wait a Minute

So now I’m reading about the problems we used to encounter with Nobody’s Fault and thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. I didn’t hear any grain or distortion. Not on the good copies anyway.”

Of course the reason I hadn’t heard those problems is that over the last year or so we’d fixed them.

How I don’t really know.

Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better.

Or maybe it was that in combination with a few new room tweaks.

Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know.

Annual Shootouts

The roughly annual shootouts we do for most titles show us out how far we’ve come, or if we’ve come any distance at all.

Fortunately for us the improvements in this case, regardless of what they might be or when they might have occurred, were incontrovertible. Presence was now playing at a higher level.

It’s yet more evidence supporting the importance of making real progress in this hobby by taking full advantage of the revolutions in audio of the last twenty or more years. Follow our lead and you too will have the records you like to play sounding better than ever.

It’s natural to blame sonic shortcomings on the recording; everyone does it. But in this case we was wrong.

The grain and distortion we mentioned are no longer a problem on the best copies. We’ve worked diligently on every aspect of record cleaning and reproduction, and now there’s no doubt that we can get Presence to play much better than we could before.

This is why we keep experimenting, tweaking and testing, and why we encourage you to do the same.

Side One

Achilles Last Stand
For Your Life
Royal Orleans

Side Two

Nobody’s Fault But Mine
Candy Store Rock
Hots On For Nowhere
Tea For One

Further Reading

2 comments

  1. It’s gratifying to read this, Tom. I’ve purchased lots of records I thought had groove damage. Including some from you (never a white hot.) Subsequnt improvements, my Tri-Planar, particularly, made it vanish from nearly all records. If only I could have back the records I returned to you due to what I thought was groove damage.

    Funny – new heavy vinyl rarely has that sound. Maybe that’s part of why people like it more. Lo-Fi stereos can’t show groove damage when it is present. mid-fi does, on some old records, and a truly great setup makes it all but vanish again.

    Reply

    1. Aaron,
      These are good points. The Triplanar arm fitted with the Dynavector 17dx would solve a lot of problems that audiophiles complain about with vintage pressings. At $8k for the pair, and another $6k for a good phono stage, it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of audiophiles will never have a setup of this quality, and will make a lot of mistaken judgments about records as a result.

      You have learned this the hard way, but the hard way is better than no way at all.

      The mid-fi equipment distortions you refer to are often caused by a mismatched arm and cart, poor setup, poor cleaning, and other such things.

      Audiophiles at the middle level — think Hoffman forum types — think they are hearing their records correctly because their system is many steps up from where they started, but they have an unimaginably long way to go, and for the most part see no reason to try and get there.

      I wrote a long piece about this very conundrum, which I’ve reprinted below:

      Dramatic limitations and massive amounts of colorations are endemic to home audio systems.

      The only way to get rid of them is by doing the unimaginably difficult work it takes to learn how to identify them and then figure out ways to root them out.

      This, in my experience, is a process that will rarely be accomplished, even by the truly dedicated. It unfolds slowly, over the course of decades, and only for a very small percentage of audiophiles. Most will simply give up at some point and choose to enjoy whatever sound quality they have managed to achieve up to that time. To attempt to go further feels like banging your head against a wall.

      To push on in this devilishly difficult hobby we have chosen for ourselves is for the few, not the many.

      (It helped that we got paid to do it. An undiagnosed but all-too-real obsessive personality disorder also played a part, as did certain records that I fell in love with a long time ago.)

      Pass/Not-Yet

      In our opinion, some of those who gave up the fight did so prematurely. They thought they’d come a long way, and perhaps they had, but there was still plenty of potentially life-changing improvement possible.

      Can you blame them? Devoting the seemingly endless amounts of time and money necessary to climb the slippery ladder that leads to better sound is not a choice most audiophiles are in a position to make. Wives, children, jobs, mortgages, and a great deal more — especially the lack of a dedicated listening room — all conspire to limit the efforts of even the most committed audiophile. Not to pile on, but there is an easy way to spot these folks, the ones who could only go so far:

      By the records they own (many of which are on Heavy Vinyl),
      Or want to buy (ditto),

      Or have nice things to say about (ditto again, read the posts found on every audiophile forum).
      We’ve made a partial list of the records that best identify this group, and it can be found here. We describe such records this way:

      Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are crucial to hi-fidelity sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the advocates for these records are failing fundamentally to judge their sound correctly.

      At first we called these kinds of records Pass-Fail.

      As of 2023, we prefer the term “pass/not-yet,” implying that although these listeners may not be where they should be in audio yet, there is still hope. If they keep at it, they might just get to a better place, the same way we did, by endlessly tuning, tweaking and testing their systems, using good records and nothing but good records.

      It should be noted that bad records, the kind being made by audiophile labels of every stripe these days, are no good for any of this work. The goal is to figure out how to make top quality vintage pressings sound right. (More on that subject here.)

      Most new pressings will only sound enjoyable if the system playing them is good at hiding their flaws. We hope it goes without saying that no right-thinking audiophile should want anything to do with such a system, or such records.

      The links can be accessed by clicking here.

      Reply

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