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SONIC GRADE: (?) |
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| Side one: |
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| Side two: |
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VINYL PLAYGRADE:(?) |
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| Side one: |
Mint Minus Minus to EX++ |
| Side two: |
Mint Minus Minus to EX++ |
Sometimes the copy with the best sound is not the copy with the quietest vinyl. The best sounding copy is always going to win the shootout, the condition of its vinyl not withstanding. If you can tolerate the surfaces on this pressing you are in for some amazing music and sound. If for any reason you are not happy with the sound or condition of the album we are of course happy to take it back for a full refund, including the domestic return postage.
WOW! Absolutely incredible sound for this classic album. This pressing just knocked us out from beginning to end -- this is the Zep II sound you want.
At least 80% of the copies we buy these days -- for many hundreds of dollars each I might add -- go right back to the seller. The biggest problem we run into besides obvious scratches that play and worn out grooves is easy to spot: just play the song Thank You at the end of side one. Most of the time there is inner groove damage so bad that the track becomes virtually unlistenable.
It's become a common dealbreaker for the records we buy on the internet. We get them in, we play that track, we hear it distort and we pack the record up and sent it back to the seller.
But this copy plays clean (barring a few light marks) all the way to the end on both sides -- assuming you have a highly-tweaked, high-performance front end of course.
Turn It Up!
This is undoubtedly one of the best, maybe THE best hard rock recording of all time, but you need a good pressing if you're going to unleash anything approaching its full potential. We just conducted a shootout and heard MUCH more bad sound than good. You name it -- imports, reissues, originals -- we've played 'em, and most of them were TERRIBLE. (Especially the non-RL originals. That's some of the worst sound we've ever heard. If you see a "J" stamper run for your life.)
The best copies of Zep II have the kind of rock and roll firepower that's guaranteed to bring any system to its knees. I can tell you with no sense of shame whatsoever that I do not have a system powerful enough to play this record at the levels I was listening to it at in one of our shootouts a while back. When the big bass comes in, hell yeah it distorts. It would have distorted worse at any concert the band ever played. Did people walk out, or ask the band to turn down the volume? No way. The volume IS the sound.
That's what the album is trying to prove. This recording is a statement by the band that they can fuse so much sonic power into a piece of vinyl that no matter what stereo you own, no matter how big the speakers, no matter how many watts you think you have, IT'S NOT ENOUGH.
The music will be so good you be unable to restrain yourself from turning it up louder, and louder, and still louder, making the distortion you hear an intoxicating part of the music. Resistance, as well all know, is futile.
The louder you play a top copy the better it sounds. Turn up Moby Dick as loud as you can. Now it's starting to sound like the real thing. But drum kits play FAR LOUDER than any stereo can, so even as loud as you can play it isn't as loud as the real thing. This is in itself a form of distortion, a change from the original sound.
If at the end of a side you don't feel like you've just been run over by a freight train, you missed out on one of the greatest musical experiences known to man: Led Zeppelin at ear-splitting levels. If you missed them in concert, and I did, this is the only way to get some sense of what it might have been like. (Assuming of course that you have the room, the speakers and all the other stuff needed to reproduce this album. Maybe one out of fifty systems I've ever run into fits that bill. But we're all trying, at least I hope we are, and it's good to have goals in life, even ones you can never reach.)
Zep II: None Rocks Harder
This has to be the hardest rocking rock album of all time. As you will read below, the best copies -- often with the same stampers as the not-as-good copies by the way -- have a LIFE and a POWER to them that you just don't find on many records. Almost none in fact. And certainly I have never heard a CD that sounded remotely like this. I doubt that day will ever come. As long as we have records like this, what difference does it make?
Happy Hunting!
Few clean copies of Zeps Classic First Five Albums can be found in stores these days, and the prices keep going up with no end in sight. The bins full of minty LPs by Pink Floyd, The Stones, Zep, The Beatles, The Who and Classic Rock Artists in general are a thing of the past. The cost of picking up a minty looking copy that sounds like crap or is full of groove damage is considerable to us. Lucky for you, we buy those records so you don't have to.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.
