More of the Music of Traffic

More of the Music of Steve Winwood

Sonic Grade: F

Another MoFi LP debunked.

Of course our Hot Stamper pressings are going to be better than the Anadisq LP from the mid ’90s.

How much better?

Words fail me.

The MoFi of Low Spark of High Heeled Boys was an out and out disaster. Perhaps some of the MoFi collectors didn’t notice because they had nothing to compare it to. God forbid they would ever lower themselves to buy a “common” pressing such as one of our domestic Islands.

Had they done so what they would have heard is huge amounts of musical information that is simply missing from the MoFi pressing.

The MoFi has no leading edges to any of the transients; they’re shaved off, how they achieved this I cannot begin to fathom. Bad cutting equipment using a dull needle?

Blunted and smeared, their version is positively unlistenable. Robert Pincus once left a Post-It note stuck to a MoFi jacket of a record he was playgrading for me that pointedly summed up our shared thoughts on the quality of their mastering: “Did MoFi bother to listen to this before they ruined it?”