Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Robert Ludwig Available Now
Describing a killer copy of Performance – Rockin’ The Fillmore from years ago we wrote:
Grungy guitars that jump out of the speakers, prodigious amounts of punchy deep bass, dynamic vocals and drum work — the best pressings of Rockin’ The Fillmore have more firepower than any live recording we’ve ever heard.
We know quite a few records that rock this hard. We love to hear them playing good and loud as nature and the band intended, and we know how to get them to sound their best.
A fellow with the initials JB left this comment in one of our listings for the album:
Never once mentioned Robert Ludwig “the RL”, for the reasons behind more punch on the bottom, and hot takes on top, with him on the board. Check the deadwax as foremost. JB
He had us dead to rights — we had in fact not mentioned Robert Ludwig’s contribution to the sound of the album, something that we often chose not to do as a matter of policy up until about 2022. We explained our reasons for doing so here. (We now have hundreds of posts that give out a great deal of useful mastering information, to our knowledge far more than can be found on any other site or blog.)
But there is more to be said about this story than what is implied by what JB has written. He’s calling us out for not mentioning Robert Ludwig’s contribution to the sound of the album, as if RL deserves all the credit.
Does he? Let’s take a deeper look.
At Better Records we are naturally big fans of RL’s punchy bass on the better pressings of the albums he has mastered, especially in the case of the Bass Monster of All Time, Led Zeppelin II. We cannot be sure what “hot takes on top” means, but let’s just assume it refers to plenty of clean, clear, lively, extended top end, the kind that can be found on Zep II, Houses of the Holy, Brothers in Arms and scores of other records mastered by the man. (Or The Man, if you prefer. No question, he is indeed a legend in the mastering world, arguably the Greatest of All Time.)
We take issue with the unstated premises underlying JB’s comments, as well as his use of the words “reasons behind,” implying that Robert Ludwig logically is surely the person responsible for the punchy bass on the record, and not Eddie Kramer, the recording engineer.
Perhaps putting JB’s comments into the formal logic of a syllogism will help illustrate some points of interest for those of you who want to improve your understanding of records and their sound. Starting with two simple facts, the conclusion that JB reaches seems to be obviously true.
- Records that Robert Ludwig has mastered more often than not have punchy, powerful bass.
- Robert Ludwig mastered some of the pressings of Performance – Rockin’ the Fillmore.
- Robert Ludwig is therefore responsible for the punchy, powerful bass found on those pressings.
But digging a bit deeper: What actual empirical evidence is there to support JB’s conviction that Robert Ludwig must have supplied the punch in the bass that can be heard on the best pressings?
None, or at the very least none has been offered by our commenter.
Instead of evidence, we are offered “reasons” to assume that Robert Ludwig is responsible for the quality of the bass. Instead of testing this proposition, JB simply takes it as a given, based on what he thinks he knows about the bass on some of Robert Ludwig’s other mastering successes.
But there actually is a way to test how much Robert Ludwig’s mastering contributed to the bass, and this test eliminates the need to rely on “reasoning” of any kind. It’s the test that any true skeptic would want to carry out in order to know just how much Robert Ludwig contributed to the superb bass response of the better pressings of the record.
If we’re going to take away some aspects of the sound from Eddie Kramer, the recording engineer, and give them to Robert Ludwig, the mastering engineer, it seems only fair that we provide some evidence to justify our doing so.
Fortunately, there is a fairly easy way to do that, which in our experience is rarely the case for most original pressings, but is in fact doable for this album.
Not all the originals mastered by Sterling in the first year of the album’s release have Robert Ludwig’s initials in the dead wax.
That fact allows us to compare the sound of the sides with Sterling RL in the runout grooves to the sound of the Sterling sides without the RL and see if the bass is in fact better, worse or more or less the same. Naturally one would need a few copies of each of the different sides with and without RL’s initials in order to account for pressing variations, something you can be sure will come as a surprise to JB but is simply the standard operating procedure for us here at Better Records, and has been for more than twenty years.
End of Part One
Yes, there is still more to be said about Kramer Vs Kramer Ludwig, but that’s all there is for now. Please stay tuned for Part Two.
Further Reading