Half-Speed Mastered Records – Reviews and Commentaries

The Band on MoFi – Bad Bass Like This Is Just Annoying

More of the Music of The Band

Roots Rock LPs with Hot Stampers Available Now

In 2012 the “new” MoFi put out another remastered Big Pink. Since their track record at this point is, to be honest, abysmal, we have not felt the need to audition it.

It’s very possible, even likely, that they restored some of the bass that’s missing from so many of the originals.

But bad half-speed mastered bass — poorly defined, never deep and never punchy — is that the kind of bass that would even be desirable?

To us, it is very much a problem. Bad bass is just plain annoying.

Fortunately for all, it is a problem we have to deal with much less often now that we’ve all but stopped playing Half-Speed mastered records.

Here are some other records with exceptionally sloppy bass. If the bass on these records does not sound sloppy, you have your work cut out for you.

Some of our favorite records for testing bass definition can be found here.

Sucked Out Mids

The Doors first album was yet another obvious example of MoFi’s predilection for sucked-out mids. Scooping out the middle of the midrange has the effect of creating an artificial sense of depth where none belongs.

Play any original Bruce Botnick engineered album by Love or The Doors and you will notice immediately that the vocals are front and center. 

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room and farther apart and you can get that MoFi sound on every record you own. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve been exposed to for more than 40 years.

Nowadays I would place it under the general heading of My-Fi, not Hi-Fi. Our one goal for every tweak and upgrade we make is to increase the latter and reduce the former.

And note also that when you play your records too quietly, it results in an exaggerated, artificial sense of depth. That’s one of the main reasons we play them loud; we want to hear the pressings that have real presence and immediacy, because they’re the ones that are most likely to win our shootouts.

If you have any of our White Hot stampers you surely know what I’m talking about.

Further Reading

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Frank Sinatra – The Ideal Audiophile Pressing

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

More of the Music of Count Basie

Mobile Fidelity may have made the perfect record for you.

This, of course, depends on who you are. More precisely, it depends on whether you care about having better sound, and whether you know how to go about acquiring pressings with better sound.

As for the MoFi you see pictured, our audition notes checked off some of its strengths, which boil down to these: it’s quiet, it’s tonally correct, and on the equipment most audiophiles will probably use to play it back, it does not seem to be especially veiled, opaque or compressed compared to many of its fellow audiophile pressings.

If you’re the kind of audiophile who doesn’t want to do the work required to find a top quality vintage pressing on his own, or buy one from us, this is actually a very good sounding record and a good way for you to go.

In that sense it is the ideal pressing for most audiophiles. If you want to know if you fit into the category of “most audiophiles,” here is one way to find out:

Ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Do you want the expense and hassle of finding a nice original stereo copy?
  2. Do you want to invest in proper record cleaning equipment to restore the glorious sound of the original’s 50-plus year old vinyl?
  3. Do you want to spend the time (decades) and money (many tens of thousands of dollars) to build and tweak a top quality analog playback system?

If you don’t want to do these things, you are not alone.

In fact, you are clearly in the majority, part of that enormously tall, fat bulge right in the middle of the bell curve. As the quintessential audiophile record lover, a big part of the mass of the mass-market, Mobile Fidelity has made the perfect record for you.

Without a better pressing to play against it, you will have no reason to suspect that anything is wrong with it.

More precisely, you will have no way to know that anything is wrong with it.

We know exactly what’s wrong with it, but that’s because we are very serious about records and audio, as serious as you can get. Who digs deeper than we do?

Now that you have failed to note its many shortcomings, the only thing remaining is for you to go to an audiophile forum and write your review, telling everyone how much better it is than whatever crappy pressing you owned and will be trading in soon.

This assumes you owned anything at all. I would be surprised if the average audiophile has a vintage copy of the album to compare with the new one, but no doubt some do.

The later reissues of the album, which are common in clean condition, give ammunition to all of those who proclaim that reissues are consistently awful. That’s often not the case, but is definitely the case in this case, with some notable exceptions. (In the world of records, there are almost always notable exceptions.)

If you want to hold the pressings you play to a higher sonic standard, we are here to help.

If setting a low bar is more your style, Mobile Fidelity has been making records for you for more than fifty years. As long as you keep buying them, they’ll keep making them. They’ve been setting the bar about as low as it can go for as long as I can remember, and the fact that they are still around is positive proof that their customers like things just fine that way. Better, probably.

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Steely Dan’s Aja Gets the UHQR Treatment

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Steely Dan

It’s been almost one full year since we reviewed our first Steely Dan UHQR, Can’t Buy a Thrill. If you have a few minutes to kill, you can read about it here.

One whole year. Time flies!

Some folks chide us for constantly beating up on one Heavy Vinyl release after another, as if we actually like doing it. We don’t think that’s fair (the “constantly beating up” part, not the “like doing it” part. We actually do like doing it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do it. It costs us money and time, and obviously doesn’t put a penny in our pockets, since we would never sell you a record that sounds as wrong as most of them do).

Contrary to what some folks believe, and as we try to make clear in the following paragraphs, we’re actually quite far behind on our Heavy Vinyl reviews. The reality of our situation is that we simply cannot keep up with all the bad records being made these days.

Let’s look at the facts. The Electric Record Company’s Heavy Vinyl pressing of Quiet Kenny is still waiting for a review after three years. The Kind of Blue on Mofi at 45 RPM? That one I played at least three years ago. Still no review. I know what I want to say about it, I just haven’t found the time to say it.

Other bad records still waiting to be written up include the Craft pressings of Born Under a Bad Sign and Lush Life; the Britten Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on Cisco; Mingus’ Blues and Roots; Dire Straits’ first album, Tapestry and Blue on MoFi; the AP Plow that Broke the Plains; Black Sabbath’s Paranoid; Weaver of Dreams on Classic; LeGrand Jazz on Impex; the 2018 remix of Pink Floyd’s Animals; the Abbey Road Half-Speed mastered pressing of Sticky Fingers (shocker: it could be worse!); Tina Brooks on Music Matters (not that bad, actually); Led Zeppelin’s first album and Houses of the Holy remastered by Jimmy Page; and there are bound to be plenty of others that I’ve simply lost track of.

I have the records here in Georgia with sonic notes attached, and one of these days I will dig them out and make listings for them.

There is an overwhelming, seemingly inexhaustable supply of collectible, out-of-print Heavy Vinyl available to the credulous audiophile with a computer and a credit card.

In addition, there are hundreds of new titles being released every year, far more than a cottage operation such as ours could ever hope to find the substantial amounts of both time and money it would take to buy, clean, play and review them all.

Keep in mind that we don’t get paid to do any of that. We play and review these records to help audiophiles — customers and non-customers alike — better understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to the amazing sounding vintage pressings we offer as Hot Stampers.

We hope that at least some fraction of the audiophile public who own these titles will be able to hear for themselves the shortomings we have described and begin to consider the possibility that there might be another way.

That other way can be found in the bins of their local record stores or, for those with deeper pockets, on our site.

Either way, settling for the kind of sound found on these modern reissues is the one choice no one should be making. Especially in the case of this awful UHQR. For $150 no less. Our transcribed notes follow:

Side One – Black Cow

Very veiled vocals and snare.

Size and tonality aren’t far off.

Odd bass. A bit thick or “slow” feeling.

The hook isn’t very dynamic.

Gets hot and crunchy.

Side Three, Track One – Peg

Ugly snare and hi-hat.

Big and rich intro like the good ones then falls apart.

Flat and dry vocals.

Bluberry Half-Speed bass

Grade this side: 1+

Side Three, Track Two – Home at Last

Really hear the issues here.

Compressed, hard, flat.

Smeary hi-hat.

Summing Up the Sound

Size and tonality aren’t far off for tracks like Black Cow and Peg.

The sound is kind of rich but the mids are pretty flat and dead.

Really lacking the transparency, presence and breath in the vocals.

Lacking dynamics too.

Peaks get compressed and gritty.

Songs like Home at Last really suffer.

It’s hard, recessed and messy.

Final grades

Black Cow and Peg: 1+

Home at Last: NFG

We do not sell records with sound so mediocre that they have only earned a sonic grade of 1+.

As for NFG, what is there to say?

Note that in our review for the Cisco, Home at Last was the track with the most obvious problems there too. We said it was “the toughest song to get right on side two.”

From our point of view, it’s clear that the Bernie Grundman of 1977, age 34, had the skills and the equipment to knock Home at Last right out of the park. Contrast that with the record the Bernie Grundman of today has produced, at the age of 80, with different equipment (my money is on much worse equipment) and who knows what remaining skills.

Yes, it’s unfortunate he was stuck with a dub tape — those are the breaks — but that doesn’t excuse the fact that he made a right mess of Home at Last, a different mess but not a better mess than Kevin Gray made using whatever crappy dub tape he was stuck with.

A sad state of affairs for the audiophiles who love Steely Dan and Heavy Vinyl. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both, not with Chad calling the shots and Bernie doing his bidding.

What’s Up with Chad?

Speaking of the Bernie Grundman-Chad Kassem connection, we reproduce below the hopelessly mistaken advice we gave Chad after having played his not-that-terrible Can’t Buy a Thrill UHQR:

He used to like super-fat and tubey jazz records, and he hired Doug Sax to make some of those for him. For a while he liked MoFi-like records, and he hired Stan Ricker to make some of those for him. He hired Kevin Gray to make mediocrities like Quiet Kenny (review coming, but you can watch the Washington Post video to get the idea), and he hired George Marino to make a mess of Tea for the Tillerman.

If he’s hiring the best, as he likes to say he is, why all the second-rate and third-rate and just plain awful sounding records?

Our advice: Chad should fire all the other engineers he’s been hiring lately and just work with Bernie from now on. (The guy who cut this record should definitely not be rehired. When’s the last time he mastered a record that’s any better than passable?)

We give up. There is no hope for this guy and his astonishingly misnamed Quality Record Pressings.

There is an interview with Bernie Grundman about the making of this Aja UHQR which can be found on youtube easily enough. In it he admits that it’s mastered from a tape copy. Discogs notes:

“Mastered from an analog, non EQ’d tape copy.”

I guess audiophiles of a certain persuasion — those with an affinity for remastered Heavy Vinyl pressings know who I’m talking about — can take solace in the fact that this new Aja is still better than the unbelievably bad sounding Cisco pressing that came out in 2007. (That Cisco pressing was undeniably NFG on both sides.)

Fremer raved about that record, but now that Bernie has cut a better pressing for The Big Guy, he can obviously see how he got that one wrong, even though he seemed fairly confidant about the quality of the sound in his review from 2007.

Hey, do me a favor and take a minute and see for yourself. The guy who wrote this seems pretty confidant, right?

“This new Cisco reissue is vastly superior to both the original pressing (ABC AA 1006) and to Mobile Fidelity’s ½ speed mastered reissue (Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-0333).

‘If your stereo system (or your personal savior/used record dealer) tells you otherwise, blame it and/or him, not Elliot Scheiner, one of the original engineers on Aja who oversaw this reissue, or Donald Fagen (no introduction necessary), or Kevin Gray and Robert Pincus who mastered it from the original analog tape at AcousTech.”

In case you were wondering, the aforementioned “personal savior/used record dealer” might just be yours truly. I’ve been called worse.

No matter. He goes on to give the Cisco Aja a 10/10 grade. Seriously, those are the grades you see pictured. 10 over 10, no joke as Biden would say. (I guess the music got better in the 17 years that elapsed between the two pressings too. It happens.)

Shortly thereafter he writes:

“This remaster exudes the kind of musical honesty you might expect when one of the original engineers and the artistic center of gravity are involved in its production.”

To my knowledge, there is not a whit of evidence to support the idea that any such original engineer and any such artistic center of gravity were involved in the Cisco production.

Later on he adds:

“By the way, if someone says the reissue doesn’t sound any good, be sure to ask about that person’s playback system. For the record I listened on The Continuum Caliburn turntable with Cobra arm, the Grand Prix Monaco turntable with Graham Phantom arm and the Merrill MS21 turntable with Triplanar arm. Cartridges included Lyra Titan i, Koetsu Urushi Vermillion and Air Tight PC-1. Phono preamps included Einstein Turntable’s Choice and Manley Steelhead. Preamp was darTZeel and amps were Musical Fidelity kWs driving Wilson MAXX2s. Cables were TARA Labs Zero interconnects and Omega speaker cable. Believe me, I heard what’s on the vinyl loud and clear and it’s spectacular!”

Man, that’s got to hurt. If you own any of that stuff, my advice would be to get rid of it, and pronto.

Can Fremer really have wasted that kind of money on equipment that is so far off the mark that a piece-of-garbage record like the Cisco LP actually sounded right to him?

Yes, that’s apparently what happened. And if you have been in the audio game for any length of time, you know that Analog True Believers like him get taken to the cleaners every day of the week.

If Fremer used that same system to review any other records back then, you should seriously consider ignoring his reviews for those too. (My advice, starting in 1994, has never wavered: audiophiles who appreciate good sounding records should make a point of ignoring anything the man says or writes. Or doing the opposite of whatever it is that he advises. Now that I think about it, that might actually work better.)

I’m sure he will tell you that everything system-wise is better now. No doubt the list of equipment he owns is even longer and you can be damn sure the equipment on it is even more expensive.

Now he’s really got Aja’s number. It’s not a 10, it’s an 11!

Some of us remain skeptical. We bump into his writing from time to time, and it sounds pretty much the way it always has. If he’s learned anything about records in the last 30 years, I see no evidence of it.

You can find his Cisco reviews — the original one and the newly corrected one — on his site if you care to do the search. I honestly for the life of me don’t know why anyone would bother.

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There’s Something Not Quite Right about MoFi’s Blue

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a review Robert Brook wrote recently for the MoFi One-Step pressing of one of our favorite albums of all time, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, originally released in 1971.

BLUE: What’s the RIGHT SOUND For Joni Mitchell’s CLASSIC?

Blue Sounds Funny Now

Based on everything I am reading these days from Robert Brook, he has a good stereo, two working ears, and knows plenty about records and what they are supposed to sound like.

This was not always the case as he himself would tell you. His stereo used to be much better at hiding the faults of a record like the MoFi One-Step of Blue than the stereo he has now. He got rid of most of his audiophile electronics, got a better phono stage, cartridge and arm, improved the quality of his electricity, found some sophisticated vibration controlling platforms for his vintage gear and did lots of other things to make his playback more accurate and — we cannot stress this too strongly — more fun, more exciting and more involving.

When your stereo is doing a better job of reproducing what’s in the grooves of your records, the first thing you notice when playing a Mobile Fidelity or other Heavy Vinyl pressing is that the sound is funny and wrong. (Please excuse the technical jargon; those of you who have been audiophiles as long as we have will understand what I mean, the rest of you can just play along. All of this will make sense eventually.)

When you use colored-sounding audiophile equipment — but I repeat myself — then your colored-sounding audiophile records don’t sound nearly as colored as they would under other conditions.

For example, other conditions obtain if you have — again, sorry about the jargon — revealing, accurate, tonally correct, natural-sounding equipment, free from the colorations — euphonic and otherwise — that allow one piece of audiophile equipment to sound so different from another.

Robert, through dedication, hard work, perseverance, and, most importantly, a real love of music, has succeeded where so many have failed, and now he has a system that mercilessly reveals the flaws of these modern records in much the way that our system does. He takes no prisoners and neither do we.

It took us a very, very long time to build such a system. I got involved with high-end audio in 1975. A mere 32 years later I had a stereo that found faults with a Heavy Vinyl pressing that practically everybody in the audiophile community was raving about. With each passing year it has become more and more clear that we were right about that record and everybody else was wrong.

These other folks couldn’t hear the colorations and limitations in the sound of Blue because the colorations and limitations in their systems either drowned them out or made them too difficult to recognize.

As you may know, from that point on we never took the modern remastered records made by any audiophile label or mastered by any audiophile-approved mastering engineer at face value. We put them to the test and they failed almost every time. (We’re so glad to know that the only title we really like was not mastered or pressed for audiophiles. Whew! Still batting 1.000.)

Robert managed to compress those 32 years into a much more workable number by following our lead and taking our advice. The British writer Aubrey Menen states the idea succinctly in this quote:

The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.

If your audiophile records don’t sound like something is wrong with them, or something is missing, then it’s time to get to work and make some changes. Keep at it until the problems with these records become more clear.

Make no mistake, these records are doing some things well and some things not so well, and a proper stereo should be able to help you sort out which are which.

Most audiophile systems I have heard are not able to do this — in fact they act as an impediment to efforts of this kind. I assume it is one of the main reasons their owners have fallen for the modern remastered LP. (There are plenty of others too numerous to mention here. You can find some of them under the heading of mistaken thinking.)

Robert writes:

Not every listener will hear what’s missing from this One-Step. With most modern audiophile systems struggling to reproduce the subtle transients that make a record like Blue so compelling, I’d guess that most will not. I could even see how a lot of audiophiles would prefer this One-Step to even the best vintage copies. After all, it’s hard to find a vintage copy of Blue that plays quietly AND sounds good, and this MoFi checks both those boxes.

But make no mistake, something is missing on this MoFi, and it’s not something that can be brought back by playing it on a “better” or more expensive system. Some of the precious life of Blue has been lost in this One-Step, and it simply cannot be resuscitated. The only way to bring that life back is to find a great vintage copy and build a stereo that can play it back well.

We Know Blue

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, played copies of it by the score as a matter of fact, and you can find plenty of our reviews and commentaries for Blue on this very blog.

There is currently one on the site for those of you who really love the album and are willing to pay a premium-and-then-some price for it.

For everybody else, here is how to go about finding your own killer copy of Blue.

Our review for the MoFi One-Step of the album has been written and will be posted soon.

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John Klemmer – Touch

More John Klemmer

Audiophile Recordings with Excellent Sound

  • With solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides, this copy of the best MoFi title to ever hit the site will be very hard to beat – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Musically and sonically this is the pinnacle of Klemmer’s smooth jazz – we know of none better
  • The best sounding Smooth – But Real – Jazz Album ever made, and the only vintage MoFi we know of that deserves a place in your collection
  • “This is music straight from the heart, smooth but with a few twists and turns to make it interesting. But there are no cliche blues licks, none of the crap that players in this genre try to foist upon as ‘hip.’ Indeed, Klemmer has more in common with the late 60’s mantra playing of Coltrane or Sanders than those other guys (whose names will not be mentioned.)”
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” but with the accent on the joy amazing audiophile-quality recordings like this one can bring to your life.
  • Touch is a good example of a record many audiophiles may not know well but might benefit from getting to know better
  • If you’re looking for the best sounding jazz from the 70s and 80s, you might want to check out these titles

Touch is probably the best sounding record Mobile Fidelity ever made, and the only record of theirs I know of that can’t be beaten by a standard real-time mastered pressing.

We’re talking Demo Disc quality sound here. The spaciousness of the studio and the three-dimensional placement of the myriad percussion instruments and bells within its walls make this something of an audiophile spectacular of a different kind — dreamy and intensely emotional.

Shocking as it may be, Mobile Fidelity, maker of some of the worst sounding records in the history of audio, is truly the king on this title.

Klemmer says pure emotion is what inspired the album’s creation. Whatever he tapped into to find the source of that inspiration, he really hit paydirt with Touch. It’s the heaviest smooth jazz ever recorded. Musically and sonically, this is the pinnacle of Klemmer’s smooth jazz body of work. I know of none better. (If you want to hear him play more straight-ahead jazz, try Straight from the Heart on Nautilus Direct to Disc.) (more…)

Ry Cooder – MoFi Sure Added Plenty of Sparkle to These Acoustic Guitars

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Ry Cooder

More Records Better Suited to the Stereos of the 60s and 70s

This review is from many years ago. Hard to imagine I would not still agree with it though.

Sonic Grade: D

As you probably know, the MoFi of Jazz goes for big bucks nowadays — $500 and up. Is it worth it? 

Are you 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 take the time 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 would 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.

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Half-Speed Mastering – A Technological Fix for a Non-Existent Problem

More of the Music of Joe Jackson

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Joe Jackson

This commentary was written many years ago. We had a Hot Stamper Section back then, because we were selling lots of other kinds of records including Direct-to-Disc Recordings, Heavy Vinyl, Half-Speeds, OJC’s and various and sundry other kinds of vinyl which we thought would appeal to those in search of audiophile quality pressings.

In 2011, we stopped selling anything but records we had cleaned, evaluated for sound and found to be superior.

We do a lot of MoFi bashing here at Better Records, and for good reason: most of their pressings are just plain awful. We are shocked and frankly dismayed to find that the modern day audiophile still flocks to this label with the expectation of a higher quality LP, seemingly unaware that although the vinyl may be quiet, the mastering — the sound of the music as opposed to the sound of the record’s surfaces — typically leaves much to be desired. 

Hence the commentary below, prompted by a letter from our good friend Roger, who owned the MoFi Night and Day and who had also purchased a Hot Stamper from us, which we are happy to say he found much more to his liking.

In my response, after a bit of piling on for the MoFi, I then turned my attention to three Nautilus records which I had previously held in high regard, but now find deserving of a critical beatdown. This one is entitled:

The Sound Is Pretty, All Right — Pretty Boring 

(Note that the underlining below has been added by us.)

Hi, Tom:

Just a quick note to let you know I listened to your Joe Jackson Night and Day hot stamper LP. I don’t think I have listened to this record for at least 15 years and forgot how much Joe Jackson was on top of his game then. Great record. And it is aptly named as there is a night-and-day difference in sound between it and the Mobile Fidelity half-speed version I have. I was surprised at how bland and undynamic the MoFi was compared to the hot stamper version. Did MFSL ever listen to this title? What did they compare it to, an 8-track tape version, maybe?

The hot stamper was far more dynamic, warm, punchy, and detailed than the MoFi. The piano had a lot more weight and stood apart in the mix. In fact, I could hear all the instruments stand out in the mix a lot more with the HS version. The MoFi sounded like many, but not all, typical MFSL pressings. The very low bass was raised in the mix as was the extreme treble, like it was equalized, but there was a lot less bass and the treble was recessed and sounded more like a can of spray mist being actuated.

I was surprised at how the music came alive with the HS pressing instead of the blah MFSL. Great job on picking this one. I will be keeping both pressings of this record: the MFSL for its collectability and my ability to sell it for big bucks to some bozo who won’t know the difference, and the HS version, the one I will actually listen to.

Roger

A Good Record Doesn’t Just Sit Around

Roger, I have to think that eventually there will come a day when audiophiles will catch on to the fact that most Half-Speeds are a crock, with exactly the kind of pretty but lifeless and oh-so-boring sound that you describe. But it hasn’t happened yet, so maybe that MoFi you are keeping will go up in value. But if I were you, I’d sell it while there’s still a market for bad audiophile records.

I can also tell you that it feels good to get bad records out of your collection. It’s so much more satisfying to have a wall full of good records you know to be good rather than just a wall full of records. And as you say, it’s been 15 years since you played that NIght and Day. A good record doesn’t sit around for 15 years; a good record gets played!

But you owned the MoFi, exactly the kind of record that is easily forgotten.

Three of the Best, Or So We Thought

I just did shootouts with three of the best Nautilus Half-Speeds: Dreamboat Annie, Ghost In The Machine and Time Loves A Hero. None of them sound like the real thing, and especially disappointing was one of my former favorites, the Little Feat album. On the title track the Nautilus is amazingly transparent and sweet sounding. There are no real dynamics or bass on that track, so the “pretty” half-speed does what it does best and shines. But all the other tracks suck in exactly the same way Night and Day does. Cutting the balls off Little Feat is not my idea of hi-fidelity.

My rave for NR 24 is still on the site. Just goes to show how easy it is to be wrong. But it’s never too late to learn. We put audiophile beaters up for sale every week. Each and every one of them is a lesson on what makes one record sound better than another. If you want a wall full of good sounding records, we can help you make it happen. In fact it will be our pleasure. Down with audiophile junk and up with Better Records.

A Failed Technology

The point of this commentary is simply this: if half-speed mastering is a technology designed to improve the sound of records, it has to be recognized for what it is: a complete and utter failure.

There is almost always a non-half-speed-mastered pressing that will be superior to the half-speed. The only exceptions to that rule will be those LPs whose real-time mastering was poor to start with. This is as it should be. You can beat a bad record with a half-speed, but you sure can’t beat a good one. We prove it every week here at Better Records.

Take a look in the Hot Stamper Section and you will find dozens of records that are dramatically better sounding than any half-speed ever made. We built our reputation and practically our entire business on that simple idea. Furthermore, our philosophy is backed up by our commitment to you, the customer. We are happy to refund your money if you don’t see things our way.

We’re confident that you, like Roger here, will have no trouble recognizing the faults of the half-speed when The Real Thing comes along. We’re sure you’ll agree with us that The True Audiophile Pressing is simply the one that sounds better. And to that we say bring it on — the next shootout is about to begin.

A Confession

It’s true: We were impressed with many of the better Heavy Vinyl pressings even as recently as the early 2000s.

If we’d never made the progress we’ve worked so hard to make over the course of the last twenty or more years, perhaps we would find more merit in the Heavy Vinyl reissues so many audiophiles seem to revere.

We’ll never know of course; that’s a bell that can be unrung. We did the work, we can’t undo it, and the system that resulted from it is merciless in revealing the strengths and weaknesses of all the records we play. That system makes clear to us that these newer pressings are second-rate at best and much more often than not third-rate and even worse.

Some audiophile records sound so bad, I was pissed off enough to create a unique circle of vinyl hell to put them in.

Setting higher standards — no, being able to set higher standards — in our minds is a clear mark of progress. Judging by the hundreds of letters we’ve received, especially the ones comparing our records to their Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered counterparts, we know that our customers are hearing things the same way we do.

Further Reading

Letter of the Week – “When the needle hit the record, the room suddenly expanded by two quadrants.”

More of the Music of Queen

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Queen

Our customer Michel wrote to tell us how much he likes the sound 0f his recently purchase Super Hot Stamper pressing of A Night at the Opera.

Hi Tom,
I should title this one “MFSL, Now You Can Kiss My Ass Goodbye” from the song, you know.

A Night at the Opera and Sheer Heart Attack are my two all time favorite Queen LPs. I’ve listened to so many copies of each and decades ago found happiness for sure, like when I got the MFSL.

But later in life, listening more critically, I was never happy… so much going on… always some sort of mish-mash of sound. Turning these LPs up to max volume and jamming out was no longer pleasurable, so I found myself not playing them anymore. [Ouch.]

Recently I purchased A Night at the Opera from BR, a SHS.

When the needle hit the record, the room suddenly expanded by two quadrants. So wonderfully wide and big, the room was just filled with sound…..warmth abundant sound sans mish-mash.

The difference is truly dramatic. The depth is also there… you can feel the sound coming out of the shadows towards you in places. Absolutely stunning sound.
You have cracked the code on this one. This is an analog delight for sure. Many thanks.

Take Care,

Michel

Michel,

Thanks for your letter. I’m not sure how big two quadrants are, but I know a mish-mash when I hear one, and that is indeed the sound found on most pressings of the album, even the UK ones. I might describe it as a combination of congestion and vague imaging, a cloud of instruments, all mashed together.

A lot of records have that problem, especially if they haven’t been cleaned properly.

Later in life it seems you were rather less impressed with your MoFi than when you first bought it.

As I have said again and again on this very blog, it’s axiomatic with us here at Better Records that the better your stereo is at playing records, and the more critically you are able to listen, the worse their records will sound. There is no way their junk half-speed mastered vinyl can sound right on good equipment.

Now you know just how good A Night at the Opera can sound.

We didn’t until about seven years ago. That’s how long it took us to crack the code, but I tell you this with confidence, having played practically every version of the UK pressings ever made: the right stampers are mindboggingly good and there is nothing like them. We wrote about the subject here:

As is sometimes the case, there is one and only one set of stamper numbers that consistently wins our Night at the Opera shootouts. We stumbled upon an out-of-this-world copy of the right pressing many years ago, a copy took the recording to a level we had no idea could even be possible. (We were going to give it Four Pluses, and probably should have, but cooler heads prevailed.)

Since then we have had many copies come in, but none that could compete with the Magic Stamper pressings. And the best part of this story is that, no, the best stampers are not 1, or 2, or even 3.

In other words they are far from the stampers found on the earliest pressings.

That’s one reason it took us so long to discover them, because they are much less commonly found than pressings with the earlier stampers. By the time these later pressings were mastered, pressed and released, the album’s biggest selling days were over.

Why is that, you ask?

Who knows? Who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, it does serve to make a point near and dear to our hearts: that the idea (and operational premise of most record collectors) that the Original Is Always Better is just a load of bunk. It might be and it might not be. If you want better sounding records, you had better open your mind to the idea that some reissues have the potential to sound better than even the best original pressing of the album.

Of course this is nothing but bad news for the average audiophile collector, who simply does not have the time or money to go through the hassle of buying, cleaning and playing every damn pressing he can get his hands on.

But good news for us, because we do.

To see more albums with one set of stampers that consistently win shootouts, click here.

Thanks for your letter!

Best, TP

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Our Filmed Tapestry Shootout Was a Real Shocker

More of the Music of Carole King

Reviews and Commentaries for Tapestry

The Washington Post article that Geoff Edgers wrote includes a video of a little shootout we did for Tapestry, using, without my knowledge, the MoFi One-Step, a Hot Stamper pressing, and a current, modern, standard reissue of the album. Could I spot the Hot Stamper without knowing what record was playing?

First up (and of course unbeknownst to me), the MoFi. My impressions from the video:

That’s probably tonally correct for this record. It’s just missing everything that’s good about this record, which is a meaty, rich piano. And the vocal sounds very dry. There’s no Tubey Magic. It’s tonally correct. If you were playing me a CD right now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you weren’t. 

Next up, the cheap ($20?), current reissue:

Piano’s better.

Voice is better!

Richer and smoother.

That’s what this is supposed to sound like.

Her voice sounds mostly correct.

This might not be a particularly good record. If I played a real one for you, you might just say, oh, my God, there’s so much more.

But this is not a wrong record. It’s not awful. It’s doing something… I don’t know if I would say most things right. I’ll just say something right.

At least the person understands what she’s supposed to sound like.

Then the Hot Stamper (a Super Hot copy as it turns out):

She sounds pretty right on this copy.

I think there’s more space.

You hear more space, more three-dimensional space.

The piano: there’s more richness to the tone of the various notes that she’s playing.

I would probably pick this one.

Jeff sums it all up as follows:

So we have a winner, and I couldn’t fool the Hot Stamper king.

Without knowing what he was listening to, he chose the hot stamper of Tapestry.

If he still had it, that copy would be sold for about $400 on the Better Records website.

When we went back and played each of the pressings again, the differences were much more pronounced. The MoFi still sounded like a CD, the current Columbia reissue was still no better than passable, and the Hot Stamper became even better sounding than it had been earlier, with sound the other two could not begin to offer.

Our grades for the three pressings would have been F, C and A, in that order.

In the video, you can see that it took me a few minutes to get deep into the sound, but once I was there, it turned out to be no contest. The Hot Stamper was the only pressing capable of showing us just how good Tapestry can sound.

Colorations Are Bad Now?

The MoFi was by far the worst sounding of the three. As I said, it sounded to me like a CD.

How shocking is it that the most colored label in the history of audio produced a record with no colorations, one that sounds like a bad CD. I would not have predicted the possibility!

I would have thought just the opposite, that they would monkey with the sound and make it richer and smoother, maybe boost the shit out of the top end, but instead they apparently just took a CD and transferred it flat.

The worst of all possible worlds, and at a premium price no less.

Chad may make awful sounding records, but they are recognizable as records, just not very good ones.

Mobile Fidelity, at least in this case, made a record that doesn’t even sound like a record. That is quite a feat.

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Kansas – CBS Half-Speed Reviewed

More of the Music of Kansas

Hot Stamper Pressings of Prog Albums Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

Both this album and Leftoverture are way too bright and thin.

What were the engineers thinking — that brighter equals better?

In the case of these two titles it most definitely does not. It’s the sound that most audiophiles are fooled by to this day.

Brighter and more detailed is rarely better. Most of the time it’s just brighter. Not many half-speed mastered audiophile records are dull. They’re bright because the audiophiles who bought them preferred that sound. I did too, a couple of decades ago [make that four decades ago].

Hopefully we’ve all learned our lessons by now, expensive and embarrassing as such lessons usually turn out to be. 

Waking Up a Dull Stereo

If your system is dull, dull, deadly dull, the way older systems tend to be, this record has the hyped-up sound to bring it to life in no time.

There are scores of commentaries on the site about the huge improvements in audio available to the discerning (and well-healed) audiophile. It’s the reason Hot Stampers can and do sound dramatically better than their Heavy Vinyl or Audiophile counterparts: because your stereo is good enough to show you the difference.

With an old school system you will continue to be fooled by bad records, just as I and all my audio buds were fooled thirty and forty years ago. Audio has improved immensely in that time. If you’re still playing Heavy Vinyl and Audiophile pressings, there’s a world of sound you’re missing. We discussed the issue in this commentary:

My advice is to get better equipment and that will allow you to do a better job of recognizing bad records when you play them.

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go here:

Below you will find our breakdown of the best and worst Half-Speed mastered records we have auditioned over the years.

Further Reading