Top Artists – Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin / Coda – Our Shootout Winner from 2010

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A distinguished member of the Better Records Rock Hall of Fame and another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.

TWO GREAT SIDES and QUIET VINYL on this Swan Song pressing, one of the few good sounding copies we’ve ever played. We just sat down with the dozen-plus copies of Coda that made it through our preliminary round and only found a few that were worth writing home around. Most copies are too dry, grainy, and/or dull to get excited about, but this one is a MONSTER.

The best material on here — We’re Gonna Groove, Poor Tom, and the great live take of I Can’t Quit You Baby, just to name a few of our favorites — sounds darn good.

Of course, this probably isn’t — and shouldn’t be — anyone’s favorite Zep album. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. Drop the needle on the smoldering version of I Can’t Quit You Baby and I’m pretty sure you’ll be a happy man. (more…)

Led Zeppelin IV – With This UK Copy You’d Better Be Ready to Rock

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A Member of the Prestigious “None Rocks Harder” Club

Letters and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin IV

We did a massive shootout in 2012 for Zep’s beloved fourth album and this British pressing earned a nearly perfect score with some of the BIGGEST, BOLDEST, HARDEST Rockin’ sound we have ever heard on the album. Without a doubt this is the best sounding IV side two we’ve ever played, with the biggest bottom of them all.

When the Levee Breaks, a problematical track on even the best copies, finally sounds the way you’ve always heard it in your head — relentless and so powerful it’s downright scary.

But the best copies are so good, and so much fun, that it was definitely worth the trouble. Because the best copies ROCK, and it is a positive THRILL to hear this record rock the way it was meant to. If you have big speakers and the power to drive them, your neighbors are going to be very upset with you.

Let’s get right to why this copy is SO DAMN GOOD.

Side Two

The biggest, boldest, most dynamic, punchiest and liveliest of them all. Zero smear, live-in-your-listening-room presence, with a beautifully extended and amazingly natural and correct top end, nothing could touch this one.

Note that the vocals for the first track are always somewhat edgy on even the best copies. After playing scores and scores of copies, having adjusted the VTA every which way we could, no copy did not have at least some edge on Plant’s vocal. We’re pretty sure by now it’s that way on the tape. Our job is to find the copy that reproduces it as accurately as possible. (more…)

Physical Graffiti – Our Shootout Winner from 2008

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Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Led Zeppelin

Zep fans, rejoice — PHYSICAL GRAFFITI HOT STAMPERS ARE HERE! We thought this day might never come. As you probably know by now, most copies of this album just plain suck!

After making some improvements in our evaluation process (minor tweaks to the room and the stereo, plus some new steps in our cleaning process) and — let’s face it — some seriously good luck, we’ve finally been able to track down a few killer copies of Zep’s monster double album.

If you’ve been waiting for The Ultimate Kashmir Experience, today is your lucky day.

Though we’ve known forever that many of you were eager for them, we just weren’t sure we’d ever have Hot Stampers for Physical Graffiti. There are a number of factors at play here. First off, you’ve gotta have a whole lot of copies around to do a shootout, and clean copies of this album sure ain’t cheap. When we’re doing a shootout for a title like The Stranger, Toto IV, or even Rumours, we can afford to pick up any nice-looking copy we see without breaking the bank. Not so with this one — minty copies don’t come cheap, and most of them sound so bad that it ain’t worth the risk. (more…)

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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Led Zeppelin – Our Four Plus Shootout Winner from 2014

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Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin I

It’s hard to imagine any copy beating this one! The vinyl is Mint Minus throughout, and the sound is INSANELY GOOD!

The chances of finding these surfaces with this sound — we’ll let you do the math. If you’re a fan of this album, and who isn’t – this is the copy you want.

Side one blew our minds and earned a grade of A++++!

Our lengthy commentary entitled outliers and out-of-this-world sound talks about how rare these kinds of pressings are and how to go about finding them.

We no longer give Four Pluses out as a matter of policy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t come across records that deserve them from time to time.

Originals Vs Reissues

The reason this copy has such amazing transparency and such an extended top end compared to other copies is clearly due, at least to some degree, to the better cutting equipment used to master it.

No original pressing — on domestic or import vinyl — we’ve ever played could boast this kind of resolution, leading edge transients, articulate bass definition, and big, bold but shockingly REAL sound.

Collectors routinely pay hundreds of dollars for original copies that don’t sound remotely as good as this one.

Which is fine by us. We’re not in that business. We’re not selling the right labels; we’re selling the right sound. There is a difference.

Collecting single pressings of original albums is doable, albeit expensive. Collecting good sounding pressings is hard; in fact, nothing in the record collecting world is harder.

But if you actually like playing your records as opposed to just collecting them, then the best possible sound should be right at the top of your list and the rarity of the label right at the very bottom.

Keep in mind that we’re the guys who are all about sound, not originality.

We discussed it in our FAQ as a matter of fact:

This listing gets to the point:

These are all records that can sound better on the right reissue pressing, not the original:

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