Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

A longer review will be coming soon I hope. I think I may know why some audiophiles like the sound of this record, and will be exploring that notion in a future commentary.

The short version of that future commentary will note that the drums in the right channel of All Blues are about five feet further back in the soundfield than they are on our reference Shootout Winning Six-Eye pressing, or any other pressing of the album we’ve played for that matter.

At the time I could not wrap my head around how Mobile Fidelity could have gotten hold of the multi-tracks in order to remix the album and place the drums further back in the mix.

(I must confess I listened to their pressing for all of fifteen minutes. I had wanted to return to it at some point to get deeper into the sound of their version, to discuss in depth its many faults, but a few years later I retired and that plan never came to fruition.)

My-fi Again?

As it stands now, I’m convinced that it’s just an effect of their standard approach to mastering — sucking out the midrange — which they apparently find pleasing, perhaps when playing music through speakers placed too close to the back wall.

Or if their speakers are not shoved up against a wall, it’s possible they just like the sound of a great deal of depth in their recordings. (I have heard plenty of audiophile systems with this fault. We refer to it as My-Fi, and we are opposed to it because it is antithetical to Hi-Fi.)

Whatever they’re doing, and however they’re doing it, the result is a sound they have created for themselves because, apparently, they like it.

There is a well-know audiophile reviewer — a really well-known audiophile reviewer — who not only has his ginormous speakers placed right against the back wall. He also has them shoved into the corners.

As you might have predicted, he has been overly fond of the records Mobile Fidelity has been putting out for years. For an especially embarrassing example, click here.

Until this very moment I have always been at a loss to understand why, but things are starting to make more sense to me now.

The Opposition

We are opposed to remastered records that create a new sound for music whose old sound was fine the way it was.

We have discussed a number of other remastered records that came up with some kind of new sound, none of which were found to be an improvement over the sound the best of the earlier engineers produced.

I personally have not yet reviewed the MoFi pressing on this blog, but others have.

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Further Reading

• More on the subject of Half-Speed mastering
  
• More records that badly lack midrange presence
• These records helped us dramatically improve the quality of our playback

If you are still buying these 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 lacking on 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.

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, a distance that allows them to recreate what seems to be the right amount of depth in the recordings we play.

It is certainly possible to pull them out too far into the room, and I’ve done that plenty of times over the years.

The right distance can eventually be found by playing hundreds of recordings — preferably a large number of which will be golden age orchestral discs — and finding the distance that works the best for the bulk of them.

When it comes to initial test discs, the ones you use to get your speakers situated “in the ballpark” in relation to the back wall, a Mr. Cat Stevens taught us something that even our favorite setup disc could not.

Robert Brook has a good story about speaker placement that you may find useful as well.