Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Ry Cooder Available Now
This review is from many years ago. Hard to imagine I would not still agree with it though.
As you probably know, the MoFi of Jazz goes for big bucks nowadays — $500 and up. Is it worth it?
You’ve got to be kidding. It’s a nice record as far as it goes, but it suffers from the same shortcomings as just about every Mobile Fidelity pressing we bother to play these days (with some obvious exceptions of course).
We have a test pressing, and knowing that the MoFi is the standard against which many audiophiles prefer to judge our Hot Stampers, we listened to it first before going about our comparison test.
Our MoFi copy is actually tonally correct, which was a bit of a surprise. (Yours of course could very well be otherwise.)
Right away we could hear exactly what people like about it, the same thing that has always impressed audiophiles about half-speed mastered records: their often outstanding transparency.
Jazz on MoFi has zero-distortion, utterly clear, spacious, see-through sound.
But listen past that and what do you hear?
Don’t those guitars seem to have that MoFi Tea-for-the-Tillerman “sparkly” quality you hate: all pluck and no body, all detail and no substance?
Nothing has any weight.
Nothing has any solidity.
Nothing has any real life.
It’s pretty, maybe, but it sure ain’t right.
It’s the kind of sound that shouts out to the world “Hey, look at me, I’m an audiophile record! See how I sound? So clear! So clean!”
Which isn’t bad for about two minutes, and then it’s positively insufferable.
- More records better suited to the stereos of the 60s and 70s
- More reviews and commentaries for the music of Ry Cooder
Further Reading
Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.
If you are still buying these modern remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.
At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is wrong with your copy of the album.
And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.