Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now
The more appropriate title for this commentary might be The Two Game, in honor of The Blue Game we created way back in 2007.
That year was indeed a watershed in the history of Better Records. It was the year we officially gave up on Heavy Vinyl, having come to the conclusion that the modern remastered LP was a lost cause. One thick slab of vinyl after another was ordered up and placed on our turntable, where it lay half-dead until someone took it off and relieved us of our misery.
Signs of improvement were nowhere to be found. A slough of dubious pressings released in the fifteen years since then have only confirmed the wisdom of our decision. It seems we got out just in time!
Fittingly, it was actually Blue that finally tipped the scales.
Geoff Edgers, the writer for the Washington Post investigating the world of audiophiles, visited me in 2021 to hear what this crazy Hot Stamper thing was all about. [1]
He brought with him a number of records to hear on our reference system, 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).
That last one will cost you a couple of hundred dollars minimum, but you should save your money. It’s not worth a plugged nickel if good sound is what you are after. If you like being the only one on your block with a limited edition pressing, then I suppose you can tell your audiophile friends you own one and that it looks nice on the shelf. Whatever you do, don’t play it.
Retirement Changed My Plans
I’ve been meaning to write about Page’s version of the second Zeppelin album for more than a year. The more times I played the album, and the longer I thought about it, the more remarkable the sound of the record seemed to me, remarkable in the sense that some very interesting things were going on in the sound that would be worth writing about for the benefit of our customers and readers.
But then I retired and had lots of other things to do in order to get out of California. The review would have to wait.
In 2021 and for some time thereafter, I was so impressed with the sound that I considered buying a dozen, cleaning them up and doing a shootout with them. The sound was good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper, probably in the range of 1.5+, which is what we would typically call good, not great sound.
Still, worlds better than the truly awful sounding audiophile pressings we’ve been reviewing over the last couple of years.
I actually did buy a second copy, had it cleaned and played it against the first one we bought. It sounded virtually identical. Whatever the differences, they were minor, although if I’d bought ten copies, I suspect that the differences between the best and the worst would have been significant, but that’s really only a guess.
(Many years ago, back in 2008 I think, we had done a shootout using a Heavy Vinyl title, Sting’s Mercury Falling. We have not done many since, for the simple reason that we know of no Heavy Vinyl pressings with sound good enough to be considered Hot Stampers.)
UPDATE 2025
Actually we now know of one, which proves it can be done!)
The guys who do the listening now and I all agreed about what the new version was doing, right and wrong. [2]
I wanted to talk about the good and the bad in depth because I thought I knew what was going on with the sound that nobody else would outside of our little group of three. I felt I had unlocked its secrets, secrets no one, to my knowledge, had discussed or examined. (If you know of a good review, please send it my way. I have yet to read a good one.)
The Hot Stamper Remaster
We don’t list albums with One Plus grades anymore, but in this case we could make the argument — and back it up! — that the best pressings of Page’s version are better than any reissue ever made. No audiophile version is any good, that’s for sure. We’ve played them and reviewed them and put them where they belong, in our audiophile hall of shame. [3]
Our latest thinking is that we will give one of the Page remasters to our customers for free when they buy one of our Hot Stamper pressings, so that they can compare the two for themselves. This is currently our policy.
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As I’m writing this, I can picture myself in the store. I can still remember that the clerk who helped me find the record commented that I should have come in the week before when the record was on sale for $1 off. I certainly feel like I got my money’s worth that day. This album went on to become one of my personal treasures. I used to marvel at the way the wind instruments actually sounded like the pipes of an organ. (I wasn’t really sure at first that there wasn’t an organ playing somewhere on the record. I didn’t know much about classical music then. )
The original Mercury release of this record (sr 90016) is a shrill piece of trash, as is the Mercury Wing pressing. So many of the early Mercurys were poorly mastered it seems.