Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin’s Albums Available Now
My history with Led Zeppelin’s seventh album is a classic case of me mistakenly blaming the recording.
In our listings for Presence from about fifteen years ago (a lifetime in audio, at least for us) we noted:
“By the way, Royal Orleans (at the end of side one) never sounds good; it’s always grainy. Same story with the intro to Nobody’s Fault But Mine. It sounds like groove damage, but since it’s on every last one of our domestic copies (the only ones that have the potential to sound amazing in our experience) we know it has to be a pressing problem and not a problem with the individual copies. It’s a shame, but the rest of the songs here all sound amazing.”
This is no longer true, or at least the part about Nobody’s Fault But Mine being grainy or distorted isn’t, since I didn’t test Royal Orleans this time around.
I had just put in a fresh Dynavector 17d3 two days before and spent almost three hours getting the setup dialed in. In fact, it was so right when I was done that I spent the next three or four hours experimenting with room treatments.
When I was done the changes seemed to have opened up the sound and increased the transparency even further. (I went a little too far and had to dial it back a bit, but that’s not at all unusual in my experience.)
Wait a Minute
So now I’m reading about the problems we used to encounter with Nobody’s Fault and thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. I didn’t hear any grain or distortion. Not on the good copies anyway.”
Of course the reason I hadn’t heard those problems is that over the last year or so we’d fixed them.
How I don’t really know.
Maybe the main improvements happened just last week with the cartridge being dialed in better.
Or maybe it was that in combination with a few new room tweaks.
Or maybe those changes built upon other changes that had happened earlier; there’s really no way to know.