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Hawt Stamper Led Zeppelin II - Yella's greatest used record bin find of all time!!

YellowSnow
YellowSnow Moderator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 37,342 Founders Club
in Yellow Snow's Record Shoppe
So yesterday afternoon I strolled into Silver Platters in Bellevue on my way to work event, and I was flipping through the newly arrived used LP's I spied a minty looking Led Zeppelin II. Nothing special necessarily....I have several versions of it on vinyl. But as I am looking at the dead wax, I spot the initials "RL" followed by SS. This stands for Robert Ludwig, the mastering engineer and Sterling Sound, the facility where Ludwig cut the lacquers. There in my hands was a near mint Robert Ludwig cut pressing of Led Zeppelin II which is one of the all time holy grail type collectible records. Only 100,000 or so were pressed before Atlantic had the recording remastered as this version was way too "hot" for the turntables of that era. The needle was literally bouncing out of the grooves. These can fetch $300 or more on eBay easily and I got it for $17.99. I was dumbfounded that the store's used buyer missed this.


The textbook example of good mastering gone bad is the 1969 Atlantic Records release of Led Zeppelin II. The first pressing, mastered by a young Bob Ludwig, beats every other pressing and reissue by a wide margin. This record is easily identified by scanning the matrix, a product code located in the run-out area next to the label. There, etched in the dead wax are the letters "RL/SS," shorthand for Robert Ludwig/Sterling Sound. Known among dealers as the "hot mix," it has such energy and dynamic range that when it was released it caused the needles on cheap record players to literally jump out of the grooves. This happened when Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, brought a copy home to his daughter. Judging the record defective, he immediately ordered a new pressing with the signal dialed down and compressed. Ludwig would later lament that this version "sounded puny and aghh!"

Still, like everything else having to do with manufacturing vinyl records, there are no rules or absolutes. A desirable matrix isn't foolproof. It's only a good omen. A random hot mix of Led Zeppelin II may sound fantastic, but some of the 200,000 "RL/SS" copies that were pressed sound better than others. This is what keeps Better Records in business and earns Tom Port a comfortable six-figure income. A Led Zeppelin II white hot stamper is $1,000.

https://www.wired.com/2015/03/hot-stampers/


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