All My Love: when voice and keyboards lead Led Zeppelin

A love song with a different centre

Led Zeppelin can make a familiar room feel as if it leans toward the guitar. “All My Love” invites a different kind of attention. The song is credited to John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, and Rhino’s album history describes Jones’s synthesizers as especially prominent across In Through the Out Door. That documented shift makes the relationship between Plant’s voice and the keyboard-led colour the first reason to listen.¹

HFI used a reissue LP of In Through the Out Door, first released by Swan Song as SS 16002 on 15 August 1979. The LP comes from the collection of reviewer John Lee (이종학). Led Zeppelin’s official discography says the album was recorded at Polar Studios in Stockholm during November and December 1978 and produced by Jimmy Page.

The official track order places “All My Love” between “Carouselambra” and the album-closing “I’m Gonna Crawl.” In that sequence, the song gathers attention around a direct vocal line, keyboards and the full band before the final track. Listen first for how steadily the voice holds the centre, then for the changing colours around it.

One record, four clearly divided stages

HFI’s approved production master identifies a Mark Levinson No5105 turntable, No52 dual-monaural preamplifier and pair of ML-50 monaural power amplifiers driving JBL Summit Makalu loudspeakers.

Summit Makalu takes its name from Makalu, the pyramid-shaped Himalayan peak about 19 kilometres from Everest and the world’s fifth-highest mountain. JBL documents the loudspeaker as a three-way design. Its D2830K high-frequency unit uses two diaphragms and two motors and loads into a large-format HDI horn; separate 8-inch mid-bass and 12-inch woofer units use the company’s HC4 cone construction. That is more useful here than the phrase “flagship loudspeaker.” It gives the listening a concrete question: as Plant’s voice, sustained keyboards, guitar and rhythm section move across overlapping ranges, do they remain one band rather than a set of impressive regions?²

Mark Levinson separates roles elsewhere in the path. The No52 places its control and analog-audio sections in two chassis and includes a configurable phono input; the ML-50s then dedicate one amplifier chassis to each channel. Together with the turntable, those stages form the documented analog route before the JBL pair.

A launch event becomes a listening seat

HFI recorded the system at the JBL Summit Launching Event on 16 December 2025. A matched DPA-4011 pair fed a Zoom F8n Pro through Vertere microphone cables at 192 kHz/32-bit float. A laser distance meter was used to match the microphones’ distances from the loudspeakers.

HFI positions the matched pair where those microphones most closely capture the sound heard at the sweet spot; that point is not necessarily the physical listening seat. The method gives the video one stable perspective on the complete system. Begin with voice and keyboards as a single musical relationship, then widen your attention until the band and the event space arrive together.

Let the song keep its scale

Keep the system question inside the song rather than turning every entrance into a hardware test. Follow the shifts in scale: a sustained tone gives way to the drums, the full band fills the frame, and quieter spaces reopen around the refrain. The useful question is whether those transitions remain part of one performance as the musical weight changes.¹

Put on headphones at a comfortable level, settle into a sweet spot of your own, and let “All My Love” unfold at its own pace—from the most intimate line to the full weight of the band.