*Arcana – Stamper Info

Some audiophiles complain that our reluctance to give out stamper information is selfish. We think that’s not fair.

We admit that we rarely give out the stamper numbers for the pressings that win shootouts — we paid a high price in time and effort to discover them — but we do give out a great deal of information for records that did not sound especially good to us, a free – and valuable! — service from your friends at Better Records.

12s Is Killer on Fiedler’s Gaite Parisienne from 1959

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This listing for a 12s/12s pressing is from 2008. In 2004, we liked 11s/10s quite a bit.

Our favorite performance of Gaite Parisienne is the one from Readers Digest. (Don’t bother to look for it on our site. We never have any stock as it is too hard to find and usually too noisy for most audiophiles.)

12s Hot stampers. The best sounding copy I’ve ever heard.

Jim Mitchell is famous for pointing out that many of the RCA’s that were re-recorded a few years later are inferior to their earlier counterparts.

This record is no exception.

LSC 1817 is an amazing record.

This record is merely good, with depth, soundstaging, nice string tone, etc., but not the kind of sonic fireworks to be found on the 1954 2-track recording that RCA first did of the work.

A very good Sabre Dance as a bonus, check it out. It’s the lead off track on Destination Stereo (LSC 2307) for good reason: it sounds great.

Click on this link to read more reviews and commentaries for Gaite Parisienne.

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Our History with Led Zeppelin’s Rock Classic from 1990 – 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

In 2010 we wrote the following commentary in order to provide our readers with an overview of what we thought we knew about Zep II at the time. Please to enjoy.

This is undoubtedly one of the best, maybe THE best hard rock recording of all time, but you need a good pressing if you’re going to unleash anything approaching its full potential. We just conducted a shootout and heard MUCH more bad sound than good. You name it — imports, reissues, originals — we’ve played ’em, and most of them were TERRIBLE.

Especially the non-RL originals. That’s some of the worst sound we’ve ever heard.

If you see a “J” stamper, run for your life.

The best copies of Zep II have the kind of rock and roll firepower that’s guaranteed to bring any system to its knees. I can tell you with no sense of shame whatsoever that I do not have a system powerful enough to play this record at the levels I was listening to it at in one of our shootouts a while back. When the big bass comes in, hell yeah it distorts. It would have distorted worse at any concert the band ever played. Did people walk out, or ask the band to turn down the volume? No way. The volume IS the sound.

That’s what the album is trying to prove. This recording is a statement by the band that they can fuse so much sonic power into a piece of vinyl that no matter what stereo you own, no matter how big the speakers, no matter how many watts you think you have, IT’S NOT ENOUGH.

The music will be so good you be unable to restrain yourself from turning it up louder, and louder, and still louder, making the distortion you hear an intoxicating part of the music. Resistance, as well all know have learned by now, is futile.

The louder you play a top copy the better it sounds. Turn up Moby Dick as loud as you can. Now it’s starting to sound like the real thing. But drum kits play FAR LOUDER than any stereo can, so even as loud as you can play it isn’t as loud as the real thing. This is in itself a form of distortion, a change from the original sound.

If at the end of a side you don’t feel like you’ve just been run over by a freight train, you missed out on one of the greatest musical experiences known to man: Led Zeppelin at ear-splitting levels. If you missed them in concert, and I did, this is the only way to get some sense of what it might have been like. (Assuming of course that you have the room, the speakers and all the other stuff needed to reproduce this album. Maybe one out of fifty systems I’ve ever run into fits that bill. But we’re all trying, at least I hope we are, and it’s good to have goals in life, even ones you can never reach.)

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