Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In 2022 Geoff Edgers contacted me to find out what the story was with these so-called Hot Stampers we were selling, the ones that had so many audiophiles up in arms.

I told him our records will beat anything he can find to throw at them, so we arranged to meet at my studio and play anything he wanted to hear.

He brought with him three well known titles to play on our reference system in order to get my reaction to the sound of some of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that had found favor with reviewers and the audiophile community in general, 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).

What shocked me about the sound of the Led Zeppelin II that Geoff brought over to play was how big, dynamic, present and alive it was. It sounded like a real record, not one of these remastered fakes.

At the time, it was simply not part of our experience to play a Heavy Vinyl pressing with those qualities.

We’d heard hundreds of them (and reviewed 330 on this blog as of 5/2025) 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, curated-for-sound-quality pressings we sell as Hot Stampers.

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

Houses of the Holy from the same series had a bad case of modern sound, lacking all the best qualities of the original Robert Ludwig-mastered pressings that we have come to adore. (Naturally those Ludwig masters are the only ones we would ever consider offering).

Now it’s time to talk about the first album, which I suspect will be the last of the Page remasters we will bother to play. It seems that II was a fluke.  Here is everything we didn’t like about it, which is pretty much everything.

Side One

Good Times Bad Times

• • Small, no real power

Babe I’m Gonna Leave You

• • Tonally fine
  • A very light sheen
  • Not extending high or low

Side Two

Your Time Is Gonna Come

• • Even smaller than side one
  • The organ is void of magic
  • No 3-D tubeyness or sweet glow
  • Dull/flat vocals
  • Small chorus, weak
  • Blah…
  • No…

Initial reports before we had done a shootout for the first Zep album, before we were able to include this Heavy Vinyl pressing, were that it was probably OK, not great, but not as hopeless as Houses.

Turns out it is every bit as hopeless. It may be tonally fine, but everything else is wrong, and wrong to the point that enjoying this version of the album on high quality equipment is simply not possible.

I have a couple copies of the CD (and the cassette) and they sound wonderful. If you own this awful record, buy the CD and find out for yourself if it isn’t better sounding. Hard to imagine it wouldn’t be.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Possibly, who can say? This album has been mastered and remastered for more than fifty years, and oftentimes well, as in the case of the Classic Records pressing from the 90s and some of the early domestic and UK pressings. There are plenty of options for those looking for a decent sounding pressing of Led Zeppelin 1.

This one should be avoided at any price. It’s a disgrace.

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, 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.

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