Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jackson Browne Available Now
During the recording of The Pretender, a newly invented piece of electronics was used called the Aphex Aural Exciter. It harmonically “richened” the sound in interesting and, most would say, pleasing ways.
It was designed to have a euphonic effect, and it succeeded in that aim, beguiling its listeners for a while, especially those at the lo- and mid-fi level, the obvious if unspoken target market these days (although the thought of admitting such a thing would surely cause the sky to fall) for the Heavy Vinyl reissue.
The Aphex was clearly creating distortions, but they were the kinds of distortions that many folks of the audiophile persuasion seemed to like. Which is the very definition of euphonic colorations.
The poster boy for euphonic colorations is our friend here, the famous Mac 30, an amp that came on the market in 1954 and one that still has adherents to this day, some of them quite famous. I had a pair and learned some lessons — as I did with every piece of equipment I owned — in the time I spent listening to them.
If you like old school tubey colorations, the kind we’ve found to be antithetical to the proper reproduction of music in the home, this is the amp for you.
How Much Is Too Much of a Good Thing?
When you play the MoFi pressing of The Pretender, it just seems to have more of that Aphex Aural Excitement.
Here’s the $64,000 question: is MoFi’s supposedly superior mastering technology revealing more of the “aphexy” sound already present on the tapes, or is it adding its own distortions that mimic the Aphex distortions?
It seems to me that in the case of The Pretender it’s clearly the latter.
Deja Vu on MoFi has that same too rich, too smooth sound. Where on earth did that extra richness and smoothness come from? No vintage pressings we have ever played has ever had that sound.
Obviously MoFi preferred The Pretender to sound the way they preferred it to sound, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they wanted it to sound the way they thought their customers would prefer it to sound.
Or maybe they have no idea what they’re doing and never did. That strikes me as the most likely explanation for a label that should have gone out of business a long time ago.
Is it just EQ? I’m not expert enough to know, but I do know this: Hot Stamper pressings of The Pretender have much more transparency and clarity, while at the same time offering a good balance of of sweetness and smoothness, with less of that thick, blurry, overly-rich quality that you find on the MoFi pressings of the album.
More on the Aphex
Owen Penglis on the Happymag.tv site describes the Aphex Aural effect this way:
The Aural Exciter brought presence, intelligibility, ‘air’ without hiss, and renewed clarity through its arbitrary process of adding phase shift, harmonics, compression, and intermodular distortion.
Fun Fact
According to Discogs,
Some US represses of The Pretender include a shorter version of the title track, with the the second verse edited out for a shorter running time of approximately 5:09. The label incorrectly states the running time as 5:50 (original length). This shorter version was issued on late 70s and early 80s repressings, including the Mobile Fidelity pressing (which also includes an alternate version of the first track, The Fuse).
By the way, two other famous albums that use the Aphex Aural Exciter are James Taylor’s JT and the first two tracks of his Greatest Hits. I recommend both of them highly.
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.
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.
UPDATE 2024: Exactly four fingers are needed. These are the Half-Speeds we currently recommend.
We’ve been playing Half-Speed mastered records since I bought my first Mobile Fidelity record in 1978 or 1979. That’s more than 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 swear by 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. With this hard-won knowledge we have laid out their faults, chapter and verse, in the more than 140 reviews we’ve written on this blog to date.
The more than two dozen commentaries found here are a good overview of where their strengths and weaknessed lie.
If you are still buying these modern pressings, don’t settle for our advice. Take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speeds.