Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Aaron writes to us often about records. Here is his latest offering. (I’ve made some comments of my own. They are the ones that are not italicized.)

Hi Tom,

Today I did something I’ve wanted to do for years – I played The Two Game.

The Two Game is based on The Blue Game, the one we created for Joni’s Blue Album way back in 2007. That game was apparently harder to play than we thought since nobody seemed to want to play it.

The Rhino pressing’s shortcomings were clear to us at the time, all the way back in 2007, and we noted that it was even superior to the best Bernie Grundman-mastered vintage pressings in one respect. But it seems that no one besides us could figure out what was going on with the sound of the record, even after we gave our customers a free copy so they could play it at home head to head against our Hot Stamper pressing.

With my stereo finally dialed-in and my family all out of the house, I dived in to the Page remaster of Zep 2, side by side with my White Hot Stamper. To help the comparison, I backdropped it with a bunch of other copies I’ve accumulated over the years.

Tom, I figure I’ll need several tries to get to the bottom of this, but it’s going to be an awesome ear-training experience for me, and if I have to listen to any record on repeat, this is a good one. So let me share my thoughts from this first comparison, and maybe you can point out some directions to go in next time I’m up for trying it again.

I chose The Lemon Song, because it is awesome, and because I view it as one of the tracks that’s most balanced overall, with all the instruments contributing about equally, and relatively devoid of studio tricks. Like a kid left to eat all he wants of his favorite candy, I had to eventually stop just from fatigue and satiation.

I recommended The Lemon Song to a customer who wanted to play the game, writing:

Pay special attention in your shootout to The Lemon Song. I am going to discuss some things I learned about it recently. See how all your versions do on the song and what you think each version is doing right and wrong. Enjoy and have fun.

I think the Page remaster actually corrects a problem with this track that exists on all the original versions of the album mastered by Robert Ludwig. For anyone else who wants to play the game, please consider this a clue.

Another piece of advice would be that The Lemon Song is not a good track for overall testing.

There are much better tracks for that purpose, tracks that will make it much easier to recognize what is so fundamentally different about the two pressings.

The Page remaster has a lot going for it. It clearly loses to the White Hot Stamper, and if I didn’t have other copies on hand, I’d say it really takes a beating from the WHS. But, compared to most of the other copies I still have, the Page version does quite well.

I would say the Page is tonally accurate. It never gets wooly or congested. Plant’s voice has a lot of presence. The guitar has chops. The drums (hi-hat, particularly) are distinct and not at all edgy or sizzly. The sound is forward and lively, and it’s got the ability to extend beyond the rectangle defined by my speakers. I find it a satisfying listen. It has some of the ability to transport me into the music, which is more than I can say for most copies I have. I can turn it up quite a lot without harshness setting in, although it does not get more breathtaking when it’s louder, the way the WHS does.

I would have to agree with most of that. What it does best can be summed up simply in these few words: It doesn’t sound like a remastered record. Most Heavy Vinyl pressings remastered these days have two obvious shortcomings which we have been complaining about for years.

One, they tend to be overly rich, and two, they tend to be overly smooth. Both are transparently euphonic colorations layered onto the sound by the producers and engineers of these reissues. We know that right-sounding vintage pressings exist for these recordings. We know because we’ve played them. The have all the richness the music needs to work its magic, as well as the smoothness that the vintage vinyl LP is known for.

On a tonally-correct, highly-revealing system, extra amounts of either will call attention to these kinds of mastering errors and interfere with the listener’s suspension of disbelief. (Systems of this quality are much more rare than most audiophiles think they are.)

I could end it there and say it’s a nice pressing, especially for what it costs compared to a Ludwig pressing. But, the whole point of the game is to compare the Page to a hot stamper. So here goes. The WHS sounds like four musicians are playing together. The Page sounds like four separate instrument tracks that have been assembled in a studio. At the same time as the WHS sounds like all four of them are in the same room playing together, it also sounds more as if each instrument is in its own physical space, with air to breathe around it. The WHS exceeds the bounds of my speakers in every dimension: side-to-side, above, and forward/back. The drums are larger on the WHS, and they are comparatively polite on the Page.

I can’t speak to most of the above, but I will say that the drums being larger and less polite fits with the “key” to the difference between the two versions. It’s the reason one is an absolute knockout and the other is a very good sounding record.

There is more intricacy to the WHS, with loud/soft transients, stronger attacks, and a more-sustained fade to the notes and drum strikes. This particularly benefits the bass guitar, which is far easier to track as a distinct element on the WHS. John Paul Jones plays the bass guitar in a way that lets the notes decay. He doesn’t pinch the string to stifle the notes. That’s more evident on the WHS, and it ties the whole song together.

I agree, the bass guitar sound is indeed key to the differences between the pressings. It is easier to track, and it sustains — assuming that’s what you mean by the notes decaying naturally — in a very powerful way.

I had the Page version for several years before I bought the WHS. I did not listen to the Page over and over again, the way I do the WHS, and I’m fairly certain that’s not simply because the WHS cost me 100x more than the Page.

To be fair, you’ve made some very dramatic changes to your system in that time. With a much bigger speaker and three twelve-inch woofers per cabinet, you now have a system that is much better at playing the music of Led Zeppelin than you did two years ago. And the Triplanar you have is tracing the powerful grooves of II like nothing you have ever heard, a big advantage when playing a record with massive amounts of bass. (I noted as much in 2007 in one of our earliest shootouts for the album.)

I used this as a chance to cycle through a bunch of the other Zep 2 copies I have. Later re-pressings, such as the George Pirios. A couple of Japanese pressings. In each, I could hear how later mastering engineers were trying to capture some aspect of what Ludwig was able to impart, but of course, nobody could do it all.

My take is very different from yours. I think the other engineers had no idea how to get the sound Ludwig got for the album.

Like the fellow who worked with Jimmy for this rerelease, they had a master tape and they wanted to transfer what they heard on the tape onto vinyl as faithfully as possible.

What Ludwig did was change the sound of the tape, and he did it in such a powerful way that no one has been able to duplicate the sound he achieved in all the years since then — and that was more than fifty years ago!

I thought the Page even held its own compared to one of my other Ludwig pressings. I preferred the Ludwig, but the Page was less far from it than were the other copies I listened to. (Remember, I have a pile of six of Ludwigs. I sent them to your guys to see if they wanted to buy any from me, and all were roundly rejected as hot stamper candidates.)

I guess I have a mild regret I didn’t do this comparison sooner. I’ve already sold my MoFi and my Classic. They were simply worth too much money to keep around, considering how inferior they were to my White Hot. It’s possible the Page would beat those others, far more expensive though they may be. For sure, I am able to turn the Page up a lot louder than I was able to turn up those audiophile pressings.

The only way to turn up either one of those godawful audiophile pressings is by remote control from another room, to avoid the danger of having your hearing damaged. They are bright enough to peel the paint if your tweeters are even halfway capable of doing their job. They are two of the worst remastering jobs we have ever encountered, and both belong right at the bottom of the rotten audiophile pressing barrel.

You can read all about them on this blog if you’ve a mind to. The Page remaster makes a mockery of them both, along with all the major label reissues that have come out over the years and all the pressings made in other countries during that time as well. And it’s probably under 30 bucks.

You ask on your blog, can we tell what Page was going after with this remaster? I don’t think I can answer that yet. But, it has an admirably forward and transparent sound. It never gets muffly or congested. It does good justice to the vocals and the guitar. If this is something Page was intentionally going after, he succeeded. If what he was trying to do was to top the Ludwig mastering, well, he didn’t quite do that. (At least not a hot stamper-worthy Ludwig.)

Yes, it does not have the same suite of shortcomings you mention, the ones we hear on so many Heavy Vinyl records we have the misfortune to play.

It is present. It is transparent. It is not muffled, nor does it get congested when loud.

It does good justice to the vocals and guitars.

How many Heavy Vinyl pressings can claim to have these qualities? One out of ten? One out of twenty? Not many, I can tell you that.

We bash them mecilessly because they so often lack the qualities that are fundamental to good sound.

As for Robert Ludwig’s version, Page may not have been using the Ludwig as a reference for the recut. I rather doubt he had one to play, and even if he had one, could he play it right? Doubtful.

He had the master tapes. The sound of those tapes is the sound he was trying to transfer onto quiet, flat Heavy Vinyl, to give fans of the album a chance to finally hear it right after MoFi and Classic screwed it up so badly, not to mention Atlantic themselves.

Thanks Tom. It’s nice that I’m at the point where I can do comparisons like this in a serious way.

Aaron

Dear Aaron,

Thanks for taking the time to do all the work you did. It was a lot, something I surely don’t need to tell you.

However,  we’re pretty sure the mysteries of the sound of Ludwig’s mastering have not been unlocked yet, not by you and not by anyone else to our knowledge.

As you say, you probably will need several tries. We’ve done something on the order of ten thousand shootouts since we first played the Rhino pressing of Blue, the one that has everybody stumped to this day. That’s a lot of practice. You pick up skills that you cannot acquire any other way. You’re already a better listener after the work you’ve just done, and you will continue to build on your accomplishments.

You’ve made a great first start. We hope to hear more about your progress as your efforts continue.

I will be writing more about what to listen for on the album soon I expect.

Thanks for taking a shot. It was by far the best to date. We very much appreciate it.

Best, TP

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Further Reading

• Pursuing perfect sound with Aaron B.
• More reviews and commentaries for Led Zeppelin II
• More letters from customers who did their own shootouts