milestone-2006

Thoughts on Hearing an Amazing Copy of Thriller in the 80s

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Michael Jackson Available Now

The killer copy of Thriller that we discovered in our 2006 shootout gave us a whole new appreciation for just how good the album could sound. It was a real breakthrough, and proof that significant progress in audio is just a matter of time and effort, the more the better.

Our review from 2006

I remember twenty years ago (that would be 1986) playing Thriller and thinking the sound was transistory, spitty, and aggressive.

Well, I didn’t have a Triplanar tonearm, a beautiful VPI table and everything that goes along with them back then. (More here.)

Now I can play the record.

I couldn’t back then.

All that spit was simply my table, arm, cartridge and setup not being good enough, along with all the garbage downstream from them feeding the speakers.

The record is no different, it just sounds different now. Which is what makes the record a great test. If you can play this record, you can probably play practically any pop and rock record. (Orchestral music is quite another matter.)

This Pressing Changes Everything

This pressing has a side two that’s so amazing sounding that it completely changed my understanding and appreciation of this album. The average copy is a nice pop record. This copy is a Masterpiece of production and engineering.

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Led Zeppelin on Prestigious Japanese Limited Edition Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Led Zeppelin Available Now

A classic case of live and learn. In 2006 I finally woke up to how ridiculously bad these Japanese pressings I was selling back in the 90s actually were.

It’s what real progress in audio is all about, in this case about ten years’ worth. Those are ten years that really shook my world, and by 2007 we had discovered much better cleaning technologies and given up on Heavy Vinyl and audiophile bullshit pressings such as these, whew!

Our story from 2006:

I used to sell the German Import reissues of the Zep catalog in the 90s. At the time I thought they we’re pretty good, but then the Japanese AMJY Series came out and I thought they were clearly better.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I now realize those Japanese pressings are bright as bright can be. Now, not-too-surprisingly, the German pressings sound more or less right (on some of their titles).

They tend to be tonally correct, which is more than you can say for most Zep pressings, especially some of the Classics [linked here], which have the same brightness issue (as well as many other problems).

UPDATE 2024

Only one of the German-pressed Zeppelin records is good enough to win shootouts, the only title of theirs on German vinyl that we buy these days. Of course we tried them all, at no small expense I might add, because there were a great many pressings cut by many different engineers over the course of decades that were pressed in Germany, and the only way we could judge them was to buy them and have them shipped over. In the end only one had the big, bold, dynamic sound we were after.

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