Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now
In 2022 Geoff Edgers contacted me to find out what the story was with these so-called Hot Stampers we were selling, the ones that had so many audiophiles up in arms.
I told him our records will beat anything he can find to throw at them, so we arranged to meet at my studio and play anything he wanted to hear.
He brought with him three well known titles to play on our reference system in order to get my reaction to the sound of some of the Heavy Vinyl pressings that had found favor with reviewers and the audiophile community in general, 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).
What shocked me about the sound of the Led Zeppelin II that Geoff brought over to play was how big, dynamic, present and alive it was. It sounded like a real record, not one of these remastered fakes.
At the time, it was simply not part of our experience to play a Heavy Vinyl pressing with those qualities.
We’d heard hundreds of them (and reviewed 330 on this blog as of 5/2025) that were small, flat, compressed, veiled and lifeless, but big, dynamic, present and alive were qualities we’d only experienced when playing the carefully-cleaned, properly-mastered, curated-for-sound-quality pressings we sell as Hot Stampers.
In fact, those are some of the very qualities that confer the status of Hot Stamper to a record during a shootout. That’s exactly what we’re listening for.
Houses of the Holy from the same series had a bad case of modern sound, lacking all the best qualities of the original Robert Ludwig-mastered pressings that we have come to adore. (Naturally those Ludwig masters are the only ones we would ever consider offering).
Now it’s time to talk about the first album, which I suspect will be the last of the Page remasters we will bother to play. It seems that II was a fluke. Here is everything we didn’t like about it, which is pretty much everything.
Side One
Good Times Bad Times
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- Small, no real power
Babe I’m Gonna Leave You
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- Tonally fine
- A very light sheen
- Not extending high or low