Here’s what we learned from a shootout many years ago.
Some copies sounded like they were Half-Speed mastered by Mobile Fidelity.
(This is not a compliment. We hate that label’s phony sound and we don’t know why so many audiophiles would want to put up with the colorations MFSL’s records were notorious for.)
- They had a little something phony added to the top of Linda’s voice.
- They had a little bit of suckout right in the middle of the midrange, the middle of her voice, and
- They had a somewhat diffuse, vague quality, with sound that lacked the solidity we heard on the best pressings.
These hi-fi-ish qualities that we heard on so many copies reminded us of the kind of audiophile sound we decry at every turn. We’ve played literally hundreds and hundreds of MoFi’s and other Half-Speed mastered records over the course of the last forty plus years, and one thing we know well is what they sound like.
But think about it. What if you only had one copy of the album — why would you have more than one anyway? — and it had that Half-Speed sound?
You would simply accept that the recording obviously had those qualities. (This assumes you could be expected to recognize them in the first place.)
Let’s face it, most audiophiles can’t, or all these companies would have gone out of business and stayed out of business, and their out of print records would sell for peanuts, not the collector prices they bring on ebay and audiophile web sites.
Further Reading
- More records that are good for spotting phony detail
- More records that are good for testing midrange tonality
- More of our favorite records that are good for all kinds of testing
