This excerpt is from a longer commentary we wrote in 2022 about the digital step (the horror!) Mobile Fidelity was secretly using to make their so-called One Step pressings.
What follows is one way to look at what happened and who it happened to.
This gentleman you see pictured, a certain Mike Esposito, made a foolish mistake.
He bought into the hype of the Modern Audiophile Remastered Record hook, line and sinker.
Rather than being skeptical, he wanted to believe what they told him.
He did not use his own ears to make judgments, he let others — reviewers, fellow audiophiles, the label itself — tell him what was pure and good.
Now he has learned that he was misinformed by those in whom he placed his trust. Even worse, he was lied to by the label he… is worshipped to strong a word?
He was also misinformed by the audiophile reviewers who should have known something was wrong. Not being able to recognize the shortcomings in the sound of these pressings was entirely predictable, since these reviewers never developed listening skills much better than those of Mr Esposito. (For more on just how out of his depth the man was, click here.)
His world has been turned upside down. But that’s not technically true — it was always upside down.
We know of practically no evidence to support the proposition that this label knows how to make good sounding records. We wondered how they were still in business and have no expectation of ever getting any answer more helpful than “shut up.” (If you actually have evidence to support any claim you wish to make, we can help you do that.)
Finding good records and being able to reproduce them properly is hard. Perhaps now Mr Esposito is coming to appreciate just how little he knew about either.
UPDATE 2025
Based on the fact that he charges $1.99 per month — I kid you not — to advise his clients which are the best sounding pressings of the albums he auditions, it’s doubtful that he has learned anything from his experience of being fooled by Mobile Fidelity, along with all the other audiophile reviewers who apparently are as easily duped as he is. (Is there any job in the world requiring less in the way of qualifications than “audiophile record reviewer”?)
His critical listening skills and his stereo were not good enough to show him the error of his ways.
But now just imagine the new world he finds himself in. He will now hear the faults of this useless label’s records with ease, not because he can actually hear them, but because he knows something about how the records were made that will color his thinking.
He’ll know what’s good and bad about the sound the same way that Michael Fremer knew that the Beatles releases on Heavy Vinyl had sonic issues because they were digitally sourced. MF knew they wouldn’t sound right because they weren’t made right.
He didn’t know they wouldn’t sound right because they didn’t sound right. He has never been capable of that kind of judgment, the kind of judgment that requires carefully nurtured critical listening skills. We noted as much in 1995 and have seen no evidence to the contrary since then. (If you know of some, please send it to me, I would love to read it.)
When the big guns at Apple told him they were doing the mono albums from the analog tapes, he knew those would sound good because they are being made the right way. We knew they didn’t sound good because they weren’t good sounding. We could care less how they were made. A bad record is a bad record. Trying to figure out what caused it to be bad is not a good use of anyone’s time.
When you’re an audiophile true believer, you don’t need to listen, you just need to know something, or think you know something, and then it’s easy to make judgments about the records you’re playing. You don’t even need to play them to know how they sound. They sound the way they’re supposed to, depending on how they were made, right?
This is foolishness of the worst kind. But this foolishness seems to be the most common kind in the audio world. Audiophiles are skilled at reading and thinking, not so skilled at listening and understanding what they are hearing.
Our blog is dedicated to helping audiophiles learn to hear better, following the processes that worked for us. Once you have achieved even a modest level of critical listening skills, it’s the rare Mobile Fidelity that will sound any better than mediocre to you, and most of them will just be awful. They sure sound awful to us.
Further Reading