Returning to the old Zeppelin CDs, the sound is crushed and thin - the 2014 versions are the ones to get. Well, it's easy to hear their big improvement: the sound has opened up, there's soundstage depth, they're warmer and more fleshed out. When the Zeppelin CDs first arrived in the 1990s, the mastering was only so-so the sound quality of my old LPs handily trounced them, so I wasn't sure what to expect from the 2014 CDs. According to Wikipedia, Led Zeppelin sold 111.5 million albums. Black Sabbath's first album cam out in 1970, and it sounded derivative even then. Led Zeppelin pioneered heavy metal sound, and though the bands that came later played faster and were louder, they didn't connect emotionally the way 'Zep did, at least not for me. 'Zeppelin's long-form songs weren't just showcases for extended jams, they were highly structured tunes.
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Page said he learned how to make great-sounding records by playing on so many bad ones, he learned his lessons well.
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Every upgrade made the LPs sound bigger and more exciting.īefore Zeppelin, Page worked as a London session guitarist on other bands' recordings, including the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, Donovan, Joe Cocker, and many, many unknown bands.
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Led Zeppelin LPs moved me to first invest in a better phono cartridge, then the following year I bought a better turntable, and better speakers followed that. Pure, all-analog LPs were the format of choice digital recording was more than a decade away.Įveryone noticed the sound - it wasn't just for a minuscule niche group of audiophiles.
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I started to think about the sound of music, because Led Zeppelin made it so compelling. The records of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream were great, but they sounded tinny and cramped next to "Led Zeppelin" and "Led Zeppelin II." Guitarist Jimmy Page's dense wall of sound, Robert Plant's lung-popping vocals, John Paul Jones' massive bass lines, and John Bonham's drums' thunder rattled my core. Sure, it was the music that first sucked me in, but the "Led Zeppelin" and "Led Zeppelin II" albums were so much heavier than anything I'd heard before. Led Zeppelin changed the sound of rock music in 1969, and that turned me into an audiophile.