I believer the master tape Davis mentioned not having was LZII. I did two needledrops of LZII yesterday back to back, one from my RLs and the other from the Davis LZII. while the EQ is very close, mostly +/-1 dB except for the RL is about +2dB in the upper highs), there's a sense of space and clarity on the RL that isn't quite there on the Davis. It could be gear related (since Ludwig probably was using some tube-based gear back in the day) or otherwise. It could also be the age of the tape. However, I have the MFSL version of Led Zeppelin II as I mentioned earlier in the thread and whatever tape was used for that one, there's obvious damage that backs up the rumor that it was the last time whatever tape they had was used. There was a rumor years ago on the old ICE forum that the LZII master tape was lost, but when I posted this to the FBO Led Zeppelin mailing list, some folks there who have connections inside the Zeppelin camp said that the lost tape was a safety copy and not the mixdown master. Anyway, all any of us here can do is speculate.
I honestly don't care if Davis used the mixdown master for the 2014 Houses of the Holy... it sounded terrific to these ears, that's what counts!!! If he didn't use it, then it's because it was lost... but Eddie Kramer showed a picture of what appears initially to be said mixdown master, plus there's a photo in the deluxe box-set hardcover book showing another master of the album itself (whether it's a safety copy or the original, be my guest!), in addition to the fact that many believe that Barry Diament used the original mixdown in the 1980's, so it's obviously not lost... in which case, Page and Davis would have used it... which I fully believe they did. I'm probably wrong on this one, but I've always suspected that the 2014 version of II was not from the original mixdown master-tape... it just didn't sound as full and rich as the others, like it came from a second-gen safety copy in the Atlantic archives or something... Davis did a really good job on it, but to me, it doesn't sound like a new 24/96 mastering sourced from the original mixdown tapes, the other albums absolutely do... and on another Zeppelin thread here a while ago, I speculated that the album that Davis mentioned wherein one side of which was not sourced from the mixdown was II. Again, I could be wrong... really wish now I had bought Zeppelin on dirt-cheap brand new AAA vinyl back in the early 1990's when I had the chance, alas...
I'm not getting into this with you again, but if Barry used the mixdown for Houses... in the 1980's (which you believe he did, correct?), why couldn't Page/Davis have used it three decades later?
Good points. Of course it would depend what AAA vinyl you bought. In the case of LZII for example a lot of folks on here (me included) feel the Classic Records version is the worst of their reissues and done from at the very least a safety copy of not a copy of a copy. I recall posting a picture that was on the old Classic Records web site that showed the boxed Zeppelin tapes they used for the first few albums and the one for LZII was in a box someone identified as a late 70's tape box whereas the ther albums were in late 60's/early 70's box. I did a search fro that picture yesterday but couldn't find it (and the Internet archive site doesn't seem to have subpages of the CR website). I also agree the Davis HOTH sounds fine. Yesterday I dug out my RL copy of HOTH (people are so focused on the RL version of LZII they forget he also did an great version of HOTH). The Davis and RL versions sound similar as well.
Whatever... it sounded great... I'm happy... love me some Houses of the Holy regardless... man, I love that album!!!
I turned off my ignore just to see what all the fuss was about and I see luke is still pushing the bass summing theory about HOTH which I already proved is false now on at least two occasions. I'll put him back on ignore, not because he seems like a total nutcase like t]I'd normally use for ignore but simply because he's so stubborn!
It isn’t false because you believe it is false. There is bass summing on the Davis remaster consistent with an LP master, there isn’t on the Diament. Simply sticking your fingers in your ears not believing it doesn’t make it not true.
I have heard all these comments so many times, it boils down to one thing for me. How do my own ears like it. I personally have all the original Diament, Sidore mastered CD's and love them. Always have, always will. I also have a few of the Marino CD's and like those as well, however not quite as well as the former. I don't have any of the Davis CD's, but I have no reason to think that they don't sound good as well. When these people try to persuade others with all their technical sound data, that is just nonsense to me. Sit down with your own system and let your own ears be the decider. We all hear and like things a little different, so what I like may not be the same for the next person. The good thing for Zep fans is there are plenty of all these CD's floating around so which ever one you like, you have reasonable access to it. To be honest, I don't think I have ever heard a bad sounding Led Zeppelin CD to my tastes.
it's not a matter of my believing, it's a matter of my having proved that your theory is false. Twice. Anyone with a basic competency in digital audio editing can prove it as well. It's really a shame you cannot admit when you're wrong as you do have useful contributions to threads otherwise, especially regarding the Stones and the who. However, by stubbornly clinging to that same misguided theory of yours, even when faced with proof that you're absolutely wrong, it just makes it unpleasant dealing with you. may actually be possible that John Davis did use a safety copy for Houses of the Holy or for one of the other albums (he did say there was one that was unavailable) but your pet theory about bass summing is simply not the case. Believe whatever you want, but life is much too short for me to spend my time arguing with you, so let's just agree to disagree.
Again, you keep saying that, but it’s not correct. The Diament CD has discrete stereo separation. The Davis remaster does not. Anyone with a basic competency in audio can see/hear that. In addition, the processing in question on the Davis remaster is 100% consistent with that done for LP cutting. You previously indicated the Davis was simply narrowed, but that is not true. If it was, it would be possible to widen it to match the Diament. But it isn’t.
The pictures of the tape box in the Led Zeppelin III Super Deluxe box book only have SD19128 catalog numbers on them. Not saying this wasn't from the master tape, just something I noticed. lzclassic1 lzclassic2 I saved these from the forums here when the Classic Records reissues were still in print. I had every one of them (on 33 rpm) and don't regret selling them.
He's not wrong, he's absolutely correct. You have an obvious agenda, and you keep posting your false theories as though they are fact in long winded, pseudo-scientifc posts that make little sense. You label those who post the actual facts "trolls" and make it a point to ignore them. It's insufferable. Again, we get the point. You love the remasters and you are friends with John Davis. So stop derailing threads about the original CD's with misinformation. Thanks.
Yes I saw that too. SD19128 was the 1977 US reissue. Many of the Atlantic catalog LPs were reissued around that time, including all the Atlantic Zeppelin albums up to that date (here in Canada, they prefaced the numbers with K). I suppose it's possible, III was the album for which Davis didn't have the master. On the other hand, for all we know they may have reboxed the master tape they had on file. Plus, we have no way of knowing if the pictures in the Super Deluxe box books were of tapes used by Davis. It could simply have been a case of these pictures being in a collection and then someone working on the artwork deciding to throw in a picture of a tape (actually IIRC, Ross Halfin mentioned working with Jimmy on going through pictures for the boxes). I think we sometimes forget that these releases were intended for Led Zeppelin fans and the general public and not a handful of nitpicking audiophiles on an internet forum representing 0.001% of the people buying these. Thanks. These were the ones I mentioned. I think I have them somewhere around here on file. you know if ernie Grundman hadn`t goosed the treble so much on the Classic LZII, it would have been quite good, even if it wasn't from the mixdown master. As it is, there are sibilants that are cut way too hot and even the best cartridges won't track them without some distortion. As for the Classic LZIII, there's a weird glitch in Hats Off to Roy Harper and the upper treble on that one is cranked so high, some of the acoustic guitars sound totally unnatural. I compared my copy with a US Mastercraft pressing and there was as much as a +15dB boost on the upper treble! Other than that, I love the Classic reissues. Davis came close with some of his vinyl and even exceeded Classic in the aforementioned cases, but I like the other Classic LZs, especially LZI!
Even though I've ignored WonkyWilly, I see his quote in your post, so I`ll respond to it directly. WonkyWilly: "You have an obvious agenda" Yes the truth! WonkyWilly: "You keep posting your false theories as though they are fact in long winded, pseudo-scientifc posts that make little sense." I post what I know to be fact as fact, and identify those that are my speculation as just that. You on the other hand have posted the pictures of the HOTH master tape Eddie Kramer tweeted last year (which **I** in fact posted to this forum) and stated it was the tape Barry Diament used. Unless you were actually there in the room with Barry Diament or he told you so, you have absolutely no way of knowing this to be true. So who is indeed posting false theories as fact? Not me. You. If my theory is false, prove it is false. If you don't understand it, then you obviously are not qualified to know whether it's true or false, and thus shouldn't be commenting on it! WonkyWilly: You label those who post the actual facts "trolls" and make it a point to ignore them." See my previous comment for your strange definition of actual facts. Yes, I ignore people who are obviously posting in the way folks normally describe as trolls. I ignore them since they normally don't contribute anything positive to a forum and are simply attention seekers. WonkyWilly: It's insufferable. Again, we get the point. You love the remasters and you are friends with John Davis. So stop derailing threads about the original CD's with misinformation. Thanks. I have never said anywhere I'm friends with John Davis. I'm not. Don't know the guy. Never met him. I mentioned a couple of times that he chose to send me a PM in 2012 to tell me he had the original master tapes for the Mastered for iTunes Zeppelin releases and we also exchanged PMs when he first joined this forum. As for loving the remasters, some yes, some no. I've already expressed myself adequately on this. Lots of others here have expressed similar preferences to mine; tmtomh for example. I don't see you publicly berating him at every chance. I guess I must have touched a nerve or something (or maybe you're that other Billy who used to be on here, whom I called out for being a notorious hoarder who was kicked off of FBO. I don't know or care). I would say the only one derailing this thread is you with your constant immature, insulting posts. Please stop, or I'll report you to the Gorts.
To my ears, the Davis remasters all sound very clean, even the ones that are not my favorites sonically. Davis did indeed say they didn't have the original mixdown master for one side of one of the albums. He didn't say which album or which side. Based only on listening, I'd never suspect that Zep II or III would be the album he was referring to. Both sound very clean to me. So unless or until some new evidence shows up, I'm going to continue to assume, based on lukpac's analysis, that the one side Davis was talking about was Side A of Houses of the Holy. Ever since @lukpac and @Stefan first posted their conflicting claims about the bass at the beginning of The Rain Song on the Davis Houses mastering, I admit I've been perplexed. It seems to be acceptable here for folks to troll and trash Stefan, but I find him to be a nice and reliable person, and of course I find lukpac to be very reliable as well. So I'm not sure what to think. I did try a channel-separation test on the Davis Rain Song to try to see for myself, filtering out all frequencies above 200Hz or so, and the result I found was that it was not summed to mono. But lukpac replied that I'd used too high of a cutoff frequency and that if I were to isolate only the lower bass - I don't remember what cutoff frequency he suggested - then I would see the mono summing. I don't think I ever followed up. I will have to try again when I have some time. (And BTW, for what it's worth, I like the Davis Houses mastering just fine, and ironically I think The Rain Song sounds lovely on his CD. But like most folks here, I do prefer the Diament - Houses is the best Diament Zep mastering IMHO.) In the meantime, I'm happy to have a CD mastering I really like for every Zep album except IV, and to have two different masterings I really like for I and PG.
Thanks for the kind words, tmtomh. Regarding LII & III, it's not that I think the Davis LZII sounds "dirty" (mind you that's relative as all versions of LZII have some dirt in the mix. Jimmy really did push that one too far into the red for my taste). It's that the RL has a sense of space and realism that just isn't there on the Davis when comparing them back-to-back using the exact same equipment. It's not only when comparing the Davis to the RL but also to my old Canadian T.G. pressing. The T.G. has the same advantage. This may be one of those cases where the age of the tape comes into play, if indeed Davis had the mixdown for LZII for his mastering. All any of us can do is speculate. Regarding the testing for summed bass, indeed 200Hz is too high for detecting bass summing. My understanding is that bass below 100Hz and in some cases 50Hz was rolled off on some (but not all) LP production masters. It really depends on the material. If the bass and kick drum is already mixed to the center and there aren't any percussive bass transients panned to either side, there's no real need for much in the way of the summing to mono. Obviously on those old Beatles LPs in the early 60's with bass hard panned to one side, they needed to bass sum, but later material was less problematic. Mind you, Whole Lotta Love has the bass pretty much entirely in the right channel, so those stories of the needle popping out of the groove on cheap records players trying to navigate the original RL pressings makes sense to me! In any case, the easiest test is to convert the audio to Mid/Side format. If your DAW software has channel mixing capabilities, you can make the Mid channel by mixing +50% Original Left with +50% Original Right and the Side channel by mixing +50% Original Left –50% Original Right (or you can find a couple of freeware VST plugins that do the same thing). The resulting file will have the Mid channel material in the top, and the Side channel in bottom. This works best if you have software with a spectral view (latest couple of versions of Adobe Audition, iZotope RX, newer versions of Steinberg Wavelab, or even the freeware Exact Audio Copy). Note that to view bass frequencies with any kind of accuracy, you need to use the highest FTT settings in such viewers and in the case of RX (which I use, it works best if you set the view to Extended Log). Truly mono frequencies will have nothing in the resulting Side channel because that's where all the information needed to rebuild the stereo image resides (Stereo FM Radio and vinyl LPs both use this form of matrix to convey stereo material). For material on which the bass was summed for vinyl production, there should be almost no information in the lower bass frequencies, especially below 50Hz. There will be some near the top of the range as the analog filtering used has a transition area, but down in the lower bass around 30-40Hz there should be nothing. (Note that a lot of early CDs I've seen (including all the Diament and Sidore CDs) have heavy DC Offset, which is a peak right down at 0Hz. It's probably the result of the equipment used to produce the early CDs. This frequency has nothing to do with the audio material and in fact is not desirable) So, if you check the Davis HOTH, there is indeed lots of information below 50Hz in the Mid channel. There's not as much as on the Diament because it's slightly narrower than the Diament. My theory is that Jimmy may have asked Davis to narrow the image slightly. This weekend when I dug out my Bob Ludwig mastered HOTH I compared the Rain Song width with that the Davis, and the latter is actually wider than the RL. Yes, that's partially because digital has near perfect separation, but I was using a Jico SAS stylus with quite astonishing width on the soundstage, so obviously the Davis had width, and if you wanted to make it sound like the Diament, it would quite easy to do with the right tools. Note that this is all about the bass summing theory and nothing else. Of the Diament/Sidore Zeppelin CDs, HOTH is my favorite and the one where tape quality and converter technology don't seem to hurt it as much as the others. That CD truly is the best effort Diament made for all the Zeppelin CDs but it still has some limitations and it still has a slight tinge of that thin early digital sound to me. Then again the Davis has limitations as well (I won't even talk about the Marino HOTH as I don't like it at all mostly due to the heavy-handed no-noise). I think Davis missed the opportunity to make his as great as it could have been by not taking advantage of readily available digital technology to fix the distortion in The Ocean and also the tape foldover issue marring the first crash cymbal in Dancing Days. If Steve Hoffman can go to all the trouble of doing an all-analog fix of a tape glitch on a Jethro Tull remaster he did, surely John Davis can take something like iZotope RX Advanced and fix up these little glitches once he has the digitized version. But the again, the purists among us would go absolutely nuts if face with any such revisions! Anyway, it is what it is. Enjoy the music. That's what it's all about.
Not only is it not easy, it's impossible. Why? Because the Davis isn't simply narrowed, as has been suggested. The separation has been reduced in the lower frequencies, but not the higher frequencies. That's why the right channel at the beginning of The Rain Song sounds muddy and muffled (except for the tape hiss). And it sounds that way because that's what was originally done for LP cutting. Anyone who can make The Rain Song from the Davis remaster have the stereo separation of the Diament is welcome to do so and post the result here. Of course, the separation issue isn't the only thing that points to the Diament CD being mastered from the master tapes and the Davis remaster being mastered from an EQ'd cutting master. It's just the one that comes up the most.
No, not at all impossible if you know how to do it and have the tools to do so. It's quite easy to adjust the width of a stereo image using any number of tools that have been available now for years. There are dedicated tools such as the Stereo Imaging controls in iZotope Ozone or several other plugins around. Moreover, many professional EQs offer mid/side capabilities, which means you can apply an EQ curve to the Side channel only . In this case, adding a low shelf boost to the frequencies below 100Hz or so would in effect widen the low-frequency portion of the Davis master quite effectively without touching the higher frequencies at all. You could widen the bass somewhat this way and then apply an overall width adjustment to approximate the wide sound of the Diament. If not done carefully there can be phase issues, but it can be done. If you look at forums where mastering engineers discuss techniques, there's frequent discussion of mid/side processing. It's often used for example to apply compression to vocals (normally in the Mid band) without compressing or mangling the midrange stereo image. In fact, most stereo width controls work by boosting or cutting the Side channel in Mid/Side format. It's just behind the scenes. So now you say it's reduced separation. Before you were saying it's simply summed to mono. There's a difference, so I guess we're making some progress with you. Reducing the width of the bass frequencies would not make the right channel of anything "muddy and muffled". In fact, these are descriptions one normally associates with reduced treble and/or increased bass. Reducing the bass frequencies would make it thin sounding. Try turning your bass control down on your stereo and then tell me it sounds muddy and muffled! Luke, you keep presenting something as fact that unless you were in the room with John Davis and were able to verify the origin of the tape he used, you have no way of knowing. Why can you not admit that it's only speculation just as the rest of us do?
Because it isn't simply speculation. It is a careful analysis of the releases. Specifically: 1) The Davis release has bass summing that is consistent with the use of an elliptic equalizer (Neumann EE-70, Neumann EE-77, etc) used during LP cutting. Specifically, one set to 150 Hz. In fact, if you apply the same processing to the Diament CD, the separation of the two match. Like this: The Rain Song comparison clip In order, that's: - Diament - Davis - Diament with the Audacity "Bass to center" plugin that mimics an elliptic EQ set to 150 Hz. Note the Davis and processed Diament match in terms of stereo separation, with the unprocessed Diament of course having superior separation. 2) The Diament CD has clear evidence that the tape used cuts to leader immediately after The Crunge. The edit is on an angle, and after the edit is not tape hiss, but it also isn't digital silence. On the other hand, the Davis has no clearly visible edit there, and approximately another .3s of tape hiss, which is faded out to digital silence. That is of course consistent with a copy tape. Then of course there's the whole issue with the tape boxes. It's possible to come up with convoluted scenarios to attempt to explain all of this away, but all of the facts quite easily point to Diament using the master tapes and Davis using production copies that were created during LP mastering. So, like I said, not "only speculation".
