Robert Ludwig, Engineer – Rev/Com

Listening in Depth to Houses of the Holy

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

You really get an understanding of just how much of a production genius Jimmy Page was when you listen to a copy of Houses on high quality modern equipment, the kind that simply did not exist when the record came out in 1973.

To take just one example, listen to how clearly the multi-tracked guitars can be heard in the different layers and areas of the soundstage. On some songs you will have no trouble picking out three, four and even more guitars playing, each with its own unique character. The clarity of the better copies allows you to recognize — perhaps for the first time — the special contribution each is making to the finished song.

Side One

The Song Remains the Same
The Rain Song

Check out the guitars — the sound should be warm, sweet and delicate. There are some dead quiet passages in this song that are almost always going to have some surface noise. Most copies start out a bit noisy but almost always get quieter as the music goes along.

Over the Hills and Far Away

This is a great test track for side one. It starts with lovely acoustic guitars before the Monster Zep Rock Chords come crashing in. If both parts of the song sound correct and balanced, you more than likely have a winner. And the bigger the dynamic contrast between the parts the better.

Turn your volume up good and high in order to get the full effect, then stand back and let the boys have at it.

The Crunge (more…)

Letter of the Week – “The kind of sound my CD ‘audiophile’ friends can only dream about.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

Recently bought a Tarkio Hot Stamper and what a great album it is. This record has truly great ANALOG sound. The kind of sound my CD “audiophile” friends can only dream about. This recording is a lot of fun to listen to. There is much more to it than the songs that had airplay.

Anyway, another great find from the better records crew.

Jim S

Jim,

Thanks for your letter. This is one my favorite records too. I have it on tape and that tape has been played at least 500 times.

Along with Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut, Tarkio represents the pinnacle of what we affectionately call Hippie Folk Rock.

On the best copies, the Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is some of the best we have ever heard, right up there with another record Stephen Barncard recorded, If Only I Could Remember My Name. As you may have read elsewhere on the site, the guy is a genius.

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Piano Works of Debussy & Ravel – This Is How to Make a Good Audiophile Record

Hot Stamper Pressings Engineered by Robert Ludwig Available Now

A lovely solo piano recording from Athena, which is certainly not a label we have ever associated with good sound. Just the opposite in fact.

But they did a great job on this album (or at least I thought so many years ago when I last played it. For purposes of this commentary, let’s assume the sound still holds up).

This is how to make a good audiophile record.

Yes, there is such a thing. They may be rare but they do exist. We have a few of them for sale as a matter of fact.

Take a good tape, hire someone who knows his way around a normal-speed cutting lathe (with 5800+ credits on Discogs, I would hope he knows what he’s doing) as well as classical music (he cut a huge number of records for Nonesuch back in the day), press it on good vinyl and let the audiophiles of the world enjoy it.

The Connoisseur Society original may in fact be better, but where are you going to find one?

Robert, Bernie and Doug – An Honest Comparison

In another listing for an audiophile record that Robert Ludwig cut, we noted:

I suspect that if Ludwig hadn’t stopped cutting records years ago, we would not be complaining nearly as much about the questionable sound of the modern Heavy Vinyl pressings currently inundating the market.

Bernie and Doug really started letting the record lovers of the world down, beginning as far back as the 90s. See here and here.

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Houses of the Holy on Classic Records and 156 Other Records No Audiophile Should Want Anything to Do With

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

Houses of the Holy is another one of the very bad records Michael Fremer put on his 2009 Top LP list, while passing over one of Classic’s better titles, the first Led Zeppelin album.

(We don’t like it as much as we used to, but it is still a good record if you get a good pressing of it, something that can never be guaranteed of course. We link to our review of it below.)

Michael Fremer’s web site used to be called called musicangle (now defunct). On this site you would have been able to find a feature called “157 In-Print LPs You Should Own!”

Surprisingly it seems that the link still works. If I had made a list this misguided, it surely would have turned into a “I’m sorry,  I didn’t know what I was talking about” commentary. I would have felt an obligation to correct the record, out of sheer embarrassment at the very least.

But this guy apparently never learns. As far as he’s concerned, what worked in 1982 ain’t broke and don’t need fixing.

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Letter of the Week -“The domestic copy you sent me of Houses of the Holy trashed my UK pressing.”

More of the Music of Led Zeppelin

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

Hey Tom,   

The domestic copy you sent me of Houses of the Holy trashed my UK pressing.

Side 1 is so engaging. What a difference a good Stamper makes — to be engaged by the music, not just entertained.

Thanks again.

Mark H.

Mark,

You are more than welcome!

The Best Pressings of Brothers in Arms Are Not Hard to Recognize

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

We try to be upfront with our customers that the Hot Stamper pressings of Brothers in Arms on our site have many nice qualities, but some of the best qualities of analog recordings from the 50s, 60s and 70s are not among them.

It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. We want our customers to know what to expect when they buy a modern recording, and, having played copies of this album (as well as Love Over Gold) by the score, we are qualified to tell them what even the best pressings do not do as well as we might like. In a recent listing we introduced one of the best sounding pressings from our last shootout this way:

  • Tonally correct from start to finish, with a solid bottom and fairly natural vocals (for this particular recording of course), here is the sound they were going for in the studio
  • Drop the needle on “So Far Away” – it’s airy, open, and spacious, yet still rich and full-bodied
  • We admit that the sound may be too processed and lacking in Tubey Magic for some
  • When it comes to Tubey Magic, there simply is none — that’s not the sound Neil Dorfsman, the engineer who won the Grammy for this album, was going for
  • We find that the best properly-mastered, properly-pressed copies, when played at good loud levels on our system, give us sound that was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, glorious, powerful and exciting — just not Tubey Magical

The notes you see below catalog the qualities of our 2025 Shootout Winner.

Side One

Track One (So Far Away)

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Steely Dan ‎on MCA Audiophile Vinyl – Sounds Like a Good CD to Me

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Steely Dan Available Now

Clean and clear and tonally correct, just like a good CD should sound.

If this is what you are after, why not just buy the CD? It’s bound to be a lot cheaper.

Some songs sound better than others, but I can’t for the life of me remember which ones. I auditioned copies of this record more than twenty thirty years ago. Once I got rid of them I never bought another. Why would I?

No doubt there are still audiophiles extolling the virtues of this record on various internet threads.

One thing you can be sure of: these are people who are not serious about making progress in audio.

Some of the pressings these audiophiles like can be found in our stone age audio record section.

If you have top quality, highly-tweaked modern equipment, a good room, and the myriad other things that make exceptionally good vinyl playback possible these days — in a way that was not possible even ten or fifteen years ago — you would have no reason to keep a record of such mediocrity in your collection.

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On Security, Robert Ludwig Let Us Down, Big Time

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

All the copies we had in our shootout were pressed domestically, and none of them were mastered by the legendary Robert Ludwig except for the one whose stampers you see below.

We awarded both sides of RL’s cutting a sub-Hot Stamper grade of 1+, which means the sound is passable at best, even after a good cleaning. (Without a good cleaning it would probably not even earn that single plus.)

We do not sell records with 1+ grades. We figure you can find those on your own. The world is full of them, as are most audiophile record collections.

1+ is actually a fairly good grade for many of the Heavy Vinyl pressings being made today. Some of the ones we’ve reviewed can be found in our Heavy Vinyl mediocrities section.

Any version of the album we sell will be noticeably — and probably dramatically — better sounding.

If you own any of those titles and didn’t pay much for them, you didn’t get ripped off too badly. You got something for your money. Not much, but something, and it would surprise us no end if any of them have been played much. Mediocre records tend to spend most of their lives sitting on record shelves. They’re not good enough sounding to bother with.

If you have any of these specific Heavy Vinyl pressings, something is wrong somewhere and it would be a good idea for you to figure out what before you flush any more money down the drain.

General Advice

On this title, forget the Brits. Every British pressing we played was badly smeared and veiled.

This took us somewhat by surprise because we happen to like the British PG pressings. However, So on British vinyl is awful too, so it’s clear (to us anyway) that the later PG records are bad on British vinyl and the early ones are better.

We are limiting our comments here to albums up through So. Anything after that is more or less terra incognita for us simply because we don’t care for any of the music he was making after 1986.

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How Good Are the Robert Ludwig-Mastered Pressings of Alchemy?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Dire Straits Available Now

The best domestic pressings we played, the ones cut by Robert Ludwig at Masterdisk, were simply not competitive with any of the early British LPs.

The evidence is pretty clear that the master tapes stayed in England and that only the British pressings are made from them. If you’ve played as many records as we have, it’s not hard to recognize dubby sound when you hear it.

As a general rule, this domestic pressing will fall short in some or all of the following areas when played head to head against the imported pressings we offer. Much like the records linked here:

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Letter of the Week – “For me it is like the difference between 2-D and 3-D”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

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

Hey Tom, 

As a newcomer to your business, and to the entire concept of “Hot Stamper” records, I was naturally skeptical. Many of us have invested in a wide variety of vinyl that simple failed to live up to expectations. Initially I was going to order one and only one record from you, and test your bold promises. Instead, I ended up ordering a nice variety to truly put it to the test… investing a couple thousand dollars on faith. In short, I am now your customer for life.

As a point of reference, my system includes a pair of Wilson Audio Alexia powered by 2 monoblock McIntosh tube Amps and a Mc-tube preamp. Most importantly, a Brinkmann mag drive turntable with a Sumiko low output moving coil cartridge. So, not the world’s best system, but enough to discern what is to follow.

I ordered the following:
* Carole King Tapestry, ((White Hot Pressing)
* The Doobie Brothers, What Were Once Vices (White Hot Pressing)
* James Taylor, Sweet Baby James (White Hot Pressing)
* Paul McCartney, McCartney (Super Hot Pressing)
* Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Steely Dan, Countdown to Ecstasy (Super Hot Pressing)
* Donald Fagen, The Nightfly (White Hot Pressing)

I warmed up my amps with the tuner for an hour or so and then sat and listened to some of my other records and reacquainted myself with the music from my system. First up was “What Were Once Vices…”. It was immediately apparent that I was getting a range as wide, if not wider than anything I had ever heard from my stereo. Then when I got to the last song on side one, “Road Angel” the guitar and drum interplay in the instrumental jam completely blew me away. Midway through I took the volume from loud to louder, and it exposed nothing but pure, sweet rock and roll. Literally gave me goose bumps.

I then listened to “Countdown to Ecstasy” and in this instance I owe a clean original copy, so I put it to the test. Back to back. I did not have to go past “Bodhisattva” to know it was no contest. If I had to apply a percentage, something like 20% more music comes from the Hot Stamper, and this (like all of my orders) is one of my all time favorite albums.

I won’t go on and on, suffice to say that the experience repeated itself on all of the above.

Even the Fagen copy was WAY better than the 1982 MoFi copy I paid an arm and a leg for. I have always thought that record had a true analog quality, was surprised the first time I learned it was laid down on a digital track. The Hot Stamper even adds to this great sounding record.

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