Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now
Houses of the Holy is another one of the very bad records Michael Fremer put on his 2009 Top LP list, while passing over one of Classic’s better titles, the first Led Zeppelin album.
(We don’t like it as much as we used to, but it is still a good record if you get a good pressing of it, something that can never be guaranteed of course. We link to our review of it below.)
Michael Fremer’s web site used to be called called musicangle (now defunct). On this site you would have been able to find a feature called “157 In-Print LPs You Should Own!”
Surprisingly it seems that the link still works. If I had made a list this misguided, it surely would have turned into a “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what I was talking about” commentary. I would have felt an obligation to correct the record, out of sheer embarrassment at the very least.
But this guy apparently never learns. As far as he’s concerned, what worked in 1982 ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.
The List
I can’t begin to count the bad records on this list.
There are scores of them — albums that are so bad that we actually created an audiophile hall of shame section to help you avoid them. Obviously we never got around to making listings for them all and cataloging their flaws. Who has that kind of time?
But Michael Fremer holds just the opposite view — he thinks these are records you should own. Now I suppose we can disagree over the merits (or lack of them) of a title such as Houses of the Holy on Classic (reviewed here). It’s a free country after all.
But the reason this list does such positive harm to the record-loving audiophile public, in my opinion, is that MF passes over one of the best records Classic ever cut, Led Zeppelin’s first album, in order to put the ridiculously bright and aggressive Houses of the Holy on the list in its place.
This is further evidence, as if more were needed, regarding two things that I believe are true of audiophile reviewers:
- None of them appear to be able to tell when a pressing they are reviewing has substandard sound.
From this fact it follows that:
- None of them can be trusted to know when a specific pressing of a given record sounds better than any other.
Other than that they are doing their jobs just fine. They are paid to get audiophiles to buy audiophile magazines and go to audiophile websites and youtube channels and buy audiophile pressings by the boatloads. Mission accomplished.
In the area of helping audiophiles find good sounding records and avoid bad ones, they are failing miserably and have been for a very long time.
In these four words we can describe the sound of the average Classic Records pressing.
Not all Heavy Vinyl pressings are as bad sounding as Houses of the Holy. We favorably review some of the better ones here.
Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it since the 90s.
If you want to know more about Houses of the Holy, you can learn a lot by cleaning and playing a big pile of copies. Make sure they have RL in the dead wax. The rest you will have to figure out for yourself.
Further Reading
Houses of the Holy is one of the records that helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback, along with scores of others you can read about here on the blog.
Once I realized my clean RL copy of HOTH ($25) sounded better than my Classic Records copy, I sold the Classic. The purchase price nearly covered the cost of my WHS, which brought the music to a whole ‘nother level.
Dear ab_ba,
You must have gotten one helluva price for your Classic. The WHS you bought was $699!
But talk about night and day different sound, what could be a better example?
And yet someone who has bought into the Heavy Vinyl dream was willing to pay you a small fortune for a seriously flawed pressing.
Strange world we audiophiles live in.
Thanks for writing,
TP