Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now
What are the best sounding stampers for Led Zeppelin’s albums?
As if we would tell you!
This is a reworked excerpt from a much longer piece entitled record collecting for audiophiles – the limits of expert advice
In it we discussed the various stampers for some of Led Zeppelin’s albums and what role they play in our Hot Stamper shootouts.
Please to enjoy.
There is no way to know whether a record is any good without playing it, early stamper, late stamper or any other stamper.
First pressings (A, 1A, A1) don’t always win shootouts.
If they did we would simply buy only first pressings with those early stampers and only sell copies with those early stampers, since they are the best.
But this ignores the inconvenient fact that a great many other things go into the production of a record that have nothing to do with how early the stamper is.
A single copy of an album with stampers numbered (or lettered) A, when compared to B, when compared to C, has no definitive meaning for stampers A, B, C, or any others, because of the tremendous variation in the sound of all the pressings with A,B,C and other stampers.
Example Number One
There is a hot stamper for a certain Zep album that always wins the shootouts, [redacted].
It beats the hell out of the early stampers, A and B. In fact, we don’t even go after A and B anymore because they are expensive and rarely sound good enough to recoup our investment of the time and money we would spend buying, cleaning and auditioning them in a shootout.
A and B can be good, but why pay top dollar for them when they have never been any better than “good?”
We’re looking for “great” so that we can charge a premium price for them. This accomplishes three things that are obviously of great importance to any business:
- It pleases the hell out of our customers.
- It covers our costs, and
- It lets us pay our staff good wages and bonuses for their hard work, skill and knowledge.
A good staff is essential to any business. No company can be successful without a reliable, competent, skilled group of employees. They are wholly responsible for the running of the business from day to day.They have to know what they are doing or the operation would collapse.
It is hard to imagine that any other retail record business could possibly have a staff with more than a small fraction of the talent of ours. The key members responsible for shootouts know something that few (if any) audiophiles on the face of the earth can rightfully claim to know: the sound of the thousands upon thousands of record pressings that they’ve played.
Most of our staff of (about) ten has been with us for a very long time. They run the business now that I have retired and they are doing an amazing job. Without them there would be no Hot Stampers.
Back to Zeppelin
As we say, on a certain title, A and B can be good. Some of the hottest stampers for other Zeps, the stampers that win shootouts, are D, E and F.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t buy A, B and C on those titles because they can still be pretty good, say Two Pluses. When you’ve played these kinds of records by the dozens over the course of twenty odd years you learn things empirically that no one who hasn’t done this kind of work can know.
That is why we do things the way we do them — because it works. Customers are very happy these days, and what could be more important than that?
The trick is to listen to plenty of copies of the same title, the more the better. That’s when you hear how different they all sound.
If anyone was doing this kind of thing in a serious way twenty years ago when I started (with the exception of my friend, Robert Pincus, who came up with the term “Hot Stampers” in the first place), I have yet to find any evidence of it.
And no one is really doing it at scale other than us. Because it’s expensive, difficult and time consuming.
Some of our customers have done the work. They’ve undertaken their own multi-pressing shootouts, and kudos to them for rolling up their sleeves and doing what the vast majority of audiophiles cannot be bothered to do.
That’s how we learned everything we know about records, and anyone who follows our approach will learn more from doing their own shootouts, for themselves, on their own time, on their own stereos, than they will from all the reviews, all the blogs and all the youtube channels combined.
Further Reading
And another jaw-dropper today, Tom! You’re retired?!? If this is what retirement looks like, you must have been VERY busy while you were still working! Anyway, not a total surprise, since you made it clear on that youtube video you’ve got some really talented listeners working for you. But, good to come right out and say it here. It’ll quell some critics and speculation, and as far as I can tell, the company is still in safe and excellent hands.
Dear ab_ab,
Retirement lets me do the thing I like most about the business now that I no longer sit in the listening chair, which is to write about records. It’s how I am spending most of my days these days. My wife complains that I work as hard now as I used to, even though I keep explaining to her that it’s not work, that I actually like doing it.
Critics and speculators can never be quelled. They don’t understand records at anything more than a very basic level, or they would not be critics! (Circular reasoning? Begging the question? It’s both!)
And speculators just speculate about things they rarely know much about but love to speculate about anyway.
It’s human nature of course.
That’s why we took a scientific, experimental, evidence-based approach to records and audio so that we could actually understand them in reality.
If these folks don’t have actual evidence to support their opinions, why are they typing so much?
Again, human nature. Opinions are easy to offer. Evidence is hard to come by.
If you don’t like your boat rocked, don’t read this blog!
It can be very upsetting to some people, which is why their posts are clearly emotional rather than rational.