George Chkiantz, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

Led Zeppelin / II – A Top Ten Title

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Ten Titles Available Now

You may have seen our Top 100 list of the best sounding rock and pop records on the site.

We recently picked out a Top Ten from that list and you will not be surprised to learn that Led Zeppelin II made the cut. (It may in fact deserve to be at the top of the list. That’s how good the best copies are.)

The blog you are on, as well as our website, are dedicated to very special records such as these.

It is the very definition of a Demo Disc for big speakers that play at loud levels. The better pressings have the kind of ENERGY in their grooves that are sure to leave most audiophile systems begging for mercy.

This is the audio challenge that awaits you. If you don’t have a stereo designed to play records with this kind of sonic firepower, don’t expect to hear them the way the band, the engineers and everybody else involved in the production wanted you to.

This album wants to rock your world, and that’s exactly what our Hot Stamper pressings do best.

The Evolution of an Audiophile 

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Listening in Depth to Led Zeppelin II

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Reviews and Commentaries for Led Zeppelin II

The best copies of Zep II have the kind of rock and roll firepower that’s guaranteed to bring any system to its knees.

That’s what makes it a Top Test Disc.

And if you’re looking for rock and pop albums that are very hard to reproduce, here are some that should fit the bill nicely.

Side One

Whole Lotta Love

This album is unique in one sense: both sides of ZEP II start our with MONSTER ROCK AND ROLL tracks with unbelievable dynamics, energy and bass. Most bands would be lucky to get one song like this on an album. This album has about five!

The middle section with the cymbals and panning instruments is key to the best copies. When it starts they goose the volume — not subtly mind you — and a big room opens up in which everything starts bouncing around, reflecting off the walls of the studio. It’s a cool effect, there’s no denying it.

This is the loudest, most dynamic cut on side one. If it doesn’t knock you out, keep turning up the volume and playing it again until it does.

What Is and What Should Never Be

Amazing presence. Plant is right there!

The Lemon Song

The bass parts always sounded muddy on the sub-gen copies I often found. The definition and note-like quality here is superb and it’s only found on these good originals.

There are real dynamics here — the middle part is at a much lower level than the guitars that follow. This song, like so many on II, is really designed to assault you, to give you the sense that guitars are being broken over your head. That’s the kind of power this track has. It’s also relatively smooth and sweet compared to the rest of the album as a whole.

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Today’s Heavy Vinyl Disaster from Classic Records… Zep IV

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic case of live and learn

Back in the day I thought the Classic 180 and then 200 gram pressing was the king on this title. In late 2006 I wrote:

“You can hear how much cleaner and more correct the mastering is right away…”

Folks, I must have been out of my mind.

No, that’s not quite fair. I wasn’t out of my mind. I just hadn’t gotten my system to the place where it needed to be to allow the right original pressings to show me how much better they can sound.

Our EAR 324 phono stage and constantly evolving tweaks to both the system and room are entirely responsible for our ability to reproduce this album correctly. If your equipment, cleaning regimen, room treatments and the like are mostly “old school” in any way, getting the album to sound right will be all but impossible. Without the myriad audio advances of the last decade or so you are just plain out of luck with a Nearly Impossible to Reproduce album such as this.

All of the above are courtesy of the phenomenal revolutions in audio that have come about over the last twenty years or so. It’s what progress in audio in all about.

The exact same 200 gram review copy now [this was written about ten years ago] sounds every bit as tonally correct as it used to, and fairly clean too, as described above, but where is the magic?

You can adjust your VTA until you’re blue in the face, nothing will bring this dead-as-a-doornail Classic LP to life.

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Letter of the Week – “Just curious as to why you never point out a Bob Ludwig “RL” pressing?”

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

I am an avid vinyl cat and have been all of my life. I am super curious about your vinyl. I have a pretty good ear myself for top-shelf LP’s but I am just curious as to why you never point out a Bob Ludwig “RL” pressing? Or maybe you have and I just have not noticed?

Thanks so much for a response and much respect for what you are doing and selling…

Dana

Dana, we explained it here, in a commentary we called The Book of Hot Stampers.

We give out precious little in the way of stamper numbers, no information about cutting engineers as a rule, although we do break that rule from time to time. Here is an excerpt of a listing for Rock of Ages from way back when:

What We Thought We Knew

In 2006 we put up a copy with with what we implied were Hot Stampers (before we were using the term consistently) on at least one side:

Side One sounds tonally right on the money! This is as good as it gets… Robert Ludwig mastered all of the originals of these albums, but some of them have bad vinyl and don’t sound correct.

I only played side one of the album, so I can’t speak for the other sides, but what I heard was sound about as good as I think this album can have.

There are some truths along with some half-truths in the above comments, and let’s just say we would be quite a bit more careful in our language were we writing about that copy today.

One side is no indication whatsoever as to the quality of the other three, and without the kind of cleaning technologies we have available to us today, I wouldn’t want to make a “definitive” sonic assessment for any of them.

When you play uncleaned or poorly cleaned records, you’re hearing a lot of garbage that has nothing to do with the sound of the actual vinyl. (Note that we are joking above: there is no such thing as a definitive sonic assessment of a record, from us or anybody else.)

Ludwig cut many bad sounding records. Roxy Music’s Avalon original domestic pressings are RL. They’re made from dubs and sound like it.  Same with Dire Straits’ Alchemy.

Some RL Houses of the Holy sound amazing and some only decent. It’s the nature of the beast. (more…)

Led Zeppelin / II – Gee, I Seem to Have No Trouble At All Playing This Record

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

I expect that pretty much everyone knows the famous story by now.

Robert Ludwig’s “Hot Mix” (a complete misnomer, mostly propagated by those with a poor understanding of what is involved in making records – the mix never changed, only the mastering) of Zep II was causing the needle to jump the groove when Ahmet Ertegun’s daughter tried to play it on her cheap turntable, so they recut the record with more compression and cut the bass. (The recut, if you have never heard one, may take the cake for the worst sounding pressing of the album ever made.)

Our Triplanar Mark 6 / Dynavector 17dx combination seems to play the original just fine. Amazingly well in fact.

Here’s a challenge for all the Heavy Vinyl fans in the world:

Name all the Heavy Vinyl records that sound as good or better than RL’s cutting of Zep II.

Modern engineers tell us they can cut records better now than ever before, with all the bass and dynamics that previous engineers were supposedly forced to limit for the cheap tables and carts of the past.

So where are these so-called “new and improved” records, the ones with better bass and dynamics?

I have yet to hear one. Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction.

Send your list — even if your list only has one entry! — to tom@better-records.com

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The Recordings Won’t Change, So Other Things Have To

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

Another entry in our series of commentaries we’ve grouped under the heading what’s the big idea?

It’s amazing how many records that used to sound bad — or least problematical — now sound pretty darn good. The blog is full of commentaries about them. Here’s a personal favorite.

Every one of them is proof that comments about recordings are of limited value.

The recordings don’t change.

Our ability to find, clean and play the pressings made from them does, and that’s what the Hot Stamper revolution is all about.

You have a choice. You can choose to take the standard audiophile approach, which is to buy the record that is supposed to be the best pressing and then just consider the case closed.

You did the right thing, you played by the rules. You bought the pressing you were told to buy, the one you read the reviews about, the one on the list, the one they said was made from the master tape, the one supposedly pressed on the best vinyl, and on and on.

Cross that title off and move on to the next, right?

When — sometimes if but usually when — the sound of the record doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it, you merely accept the fact that the recording itself must be at fault.

Prepare to allot a fair amount of time to complaining about such an unfortunate state of affairs. “If only they had recorded the album better…” you say to yourself as you toddle off to bed, ending your listening session prematurely, fatigued and frustrated with a record that — for some reason — doesn’t sound as good as you remember.

We did it too, more times than I care to admit.

Try It Our Way

Or you can adopt our approach and hear those very same albums sound dramatically better than you ever thought possible. Better than you remember. It happens all the time here at Better Records and it can happen at your house too. Just follow the yellow brick– uh, scratch that, just follow these four steps.

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Led Zeppelin II on MoFi — Back to the Stone Age!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed.

Yes, it’s yet another record perfectly suited to the stereos of the 60s and 70s, often referred to on this blog as the “stone age” for reasons explained in detail here.

This version of Zep’s sophomore release from 1969 has to be one of the worst audiophile remastering jobs in the history of the world. There is NOT ONE aspect of the sound that isn’t wrong. Not one!

The highs are boosted, the upper midrange is boosted, the mid-bass is boosted, the low bass is missing — what part of the frequency spectrum is even close to correct on this pressing? The answer: none.

If you’re in the market for a Hot Stamper pressing of Led Zeppelin II, we can help you, but prices these days are steep and show no sign of coming down. We typically pay $1000+ or more for the used copies we buy if that tells you anything about what to expect a Hot Stamper pressing will cost you.

Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.

If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed Mastered LPs.

At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is wrong with your copy. of the album.

And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the best.

Does It Seem to You That This Guy Knows Anything About Records? Any Records?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

I had posted one of his videos here under the heading “Does it seem like this guy knows anything about Dark Side of the Moon?”

That was too generous. Apparently he does not know anything about records period. Any records. Records with any titles.

That would include records with the title Led Zeppelin II, the subject of today’s commentary.

This video has to be The. Dumbest. Video. Ever.

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Led Zeppelin / II – A Milestone Event from the 90s

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

More Milestone Events in the History of Better Records

Here’s the story of my first encounter with a Hot Stamper Zep II.

I had a friend who had come into possession of a White Label Demo pressing of the second album and wanted to trade it in to me for the Mobile Fidelity pressing that I had played for him once or twice over the years, and which we both thought was The King on that album.

To my shock and dismay, his stupid American copy KILLED the MoFi. It TROUNCED it in every way. The bass was deeper and punchier. Everything was more dynamic. The vocals were more natural and correct sounding. The highs were sweeter and more extended. The whole pressing was just full of life in a way that the Mobile Fidelity wasn’t.

The Mobile Fidelity didn’t sound Bad. It sounded Not As Good. More importantly, in comparison with the good domestic copy, in many ways it now sounded Wrong.

Let me tell you, it was a milestone event in my growth as a record collector. I had long ago discovered that many MoFi’s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. But this was a MoFi I liked. And it had killed the other copies I had heard in the past.

So I learned something very important that day. I learned that hearing a good pressing is the best way to understand what’s wrong with a bad pressing..

Needless to say, the trade didn’t go through: he kept his copy and I was stuck with mine. But I knew what to look for. I knew what the numbers were in the dead wax. And I started hunting them down.

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Houses of the Holy – Our 4 Plus Shootout Winner from 2010

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

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.

Side two of this copy of Houses of the Holy earned the rare Four Plus (A++++) grade (making it the first copy of Houses ever to do so, I believe) with an insane combination of clarity, presence, size, richness, transparency, bottom end punch and more. Side one is not quite in the same heady league but is certainly very strong with a Double Plus grade. You’re going to have a ridiculously hard time finding another copy that can hold its own against this one. Frankly, I don’t think it can be done without the kind of operation we have here! (more…)