Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now
Sonic Grade: D
Same sonic shortcomings as the MoFi Thick As a Brick. Twenty years ago we wrote:
“The MoFi is TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end will be lush and extended. If you prize clarity, this is the one.”
But if you prize clarity at the expense of everything else, you are seriously missing the boat on Meddle (and Thick As A Brick too).
The MoFi is all mids and highs with almost nothing going on below.
This is a rock record, but without bass and dynamics, the MoFi pressing doesn’t rock, so why would anyone want to own it or play it?
I suppose you could argue that on small speakers the shortcomings of this pressing would be much less bothersome, but on the reference system we use — including the one we had twenty years ago — the lack of low end is a real dealbreaker.
The One Thing They Do
The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.
It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. They took out the bottom end so that the midrange would be clearer.
That’s one of the tricks these labels use to get their records to impress the audiophiles with small speakers, or ones that are pressed up against the wall, perhaps with a television screen mounted between them.
For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with blurry bass.
That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with those qualities and we don’t think audiophiles should be paying good money for records that sound like that.
Further Reading
The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both.
It’s dead as a doornail sound, plain and simple.
And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s and 80s. The average Heavy Vinyl LP I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? But there are scores of companies turning out this crap; somebody must be buying it.
If you are still buying these modern pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl pressings and Half-Speed mastered records.
People have been known to ask us:
How come you guys don’t like Half-Speed mastered records?
That’s an easy one. We’ve played them by the hundreds over the years, and we’ve found that as our ability to reproduce the sound of these records improved (better equipment, table setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity and the like), the gap between the better non-half-speed mastered pressings and the half-speeds got bigger and bigger, leaving the half-speeds further and further behind, in the dust you might say, again and again, with so few exceptions that they could easily be counted on the fingers of one hand.
We’ve been playing half-speed mastered records since I bought my first Mobile Fidelity in 1978 or 1979. That’s forty years of experience with the sonic characteristics of this mastering approach, an approach we have found to have consistent shortcomings.
These shortcomings have somehow eluded the devotees of these records, how, we cannot imagine.
(That’s really not true, of course. Fans of half-speed mastered records are as clueless as I was starting out. Many of the records I used to like were half-speeds. With almost no exceptions, my failure to recognize what they were doing falls under the general heading of live and learn.)
Eventually we came to understand them better, and we have laid out their faults, chapter and verse, in the 140+ reviews we’ve written on this blog to date.
The dozen or so commentaries found here are a good way to get a taste of what we’ve learned.
Further Reading
The front of the speakers, where the drivers that actually produce the soundwaves are located, are at least six feet from the back wall in our new studio.