Half-Speed Mastered Disasters

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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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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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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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

Foreigner / Double Vision – MoFi Reviewed

More of the Music of Foreigner

Sonic Grade: D

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed [decades ago] and found seriously wanting.

There is a Mobile Fidelity Half-Speed Mastered version of this album currently in print, and an older one from the days when their records were pressed in Japan (#052).

We haven’t played the latter in years; as I recall it was as lifeless and sucked-out in the midrange as many of the other famous MoFis of that period, notably The Doors (#051) and Trick of the Tail (#062). Is there any doubt that the new MoFi will be every bit as bad or worse? (more…)

The Abbey Road Remix on Vinyl

More of the Music of The Beatles

Reviews and Commentaries for Abbey Road

BREAKING NEWS from 2020

We got a copy of the Abbey Road Remix in, cleaned it and played it. Now we can officially report the results of our investigation into this modern marvel. Imagine, The Beatles with a new mix! Just what it needed, right?

So what did we hear?

The half-speed mastered remixed Abbey Road has to be one of the worst sounding Beatles records we have ever had the misfortune to play.

Hard to imagine you could make Abbey Road sound any worse. It’s absolutely disgraceful.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

I will be writing more about its specific shortcomings down the road, but for now let this serve as a warning that you are throwing your money away if you buy this newly remixed LP.

UPDATE 11/2022

As you may have guessed by now, I have completely lost interest in detailing the abundant shortcomings of this awful record. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy one.

If you did buy one, do yourself a different favor: order any UK pressing from 1970-1986 off the web and play that one head to head with it so you can hear how badly they screwed with and screwed up the new mix.

When the remastering is this incompetent, we

Remastering a well-known title and creating a new sound for it is a huge bête noire for us here at Better Records.

Half-Speed mastered disasters that sound as bad as this record does go directly into our audiophile record hall of shame.

If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.

Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope. If they target their resources (time and money) well, there is no reason they can’t get to where they need to be, the same way we did. Our audio advice section may be of help in that regard.

Tea for the Tillerman on the new 45 may be substandard in every way, but it is not a Pass/Not-Yet pressing. It lacks one thing above all others, Tubey Magic, so if your system has an abundance of that quality, as many tube systems do, the new pressing may be quite listenable and enjoyable. Those whose systems can play the record and not notice this important shortcoming are not exactly failing. They most likely have a system that is heavily colored and not very revealing, but it is a system that is not hopeless.

A system that can play the MoFi pressing of Aja without revealing to the listener how wrong it is is on another level of bad entirely, and that is what would qualify as a failing system. My system in the ’80s played that record just fine. Looking back on it now, I realize it was doing more wrong than right.

One of our good customers recently moved his stereo into a new house.

Hey Tom,

Interestingly, the electricity and spatial characteristics are so much better in the new place that I’ve had a complete sea change regarding the MoFi Kind of Blue. If you recall, I previously found this oddly EQ’d and unrealistic, but also wasn’t as hell bent against it as you are (though I certainly have been against other crappy heavy vinyl from MoFi, Analog Productions, Blue Note, etc.). Well, now I can’t stand it. It sounds fucking atrocious. The difference between it and my humble hot stamper copy is night and day. Whole collection sounds better, and is awesome to rediscover again, but this one really stood out. Onwards and upwards!

Conrad,

That is indeed good news. That record is pass-fail for me. If anyone cannot tell how bad it is, that is a sure sign that something is very wrong somewhere. Glad you are hearing it as I am hearing it. It is indeed atrocious.

TP

Conrad followed up with these remarks:

The MoFi Kind of Blue never sounded right or real, but now it sounds downright puke. Will hang onto it and use as a test record for fun on other systems. As bad as it is, as I’ve said before, you have no idea how much worse their Junior Wells Hoodoo Man Blues is. My god; you’d suspect your system is broken, playing that. Bloated asphyxiated subaquatic delirium.

Cheers,

C

Well said!

Further Reading

This Nautilus LP Has the Most Bloated, Ill-Defined, Overblown Bass in the Sad, Sordid History of Half-Speed Mastering

More Crosby, Stills and Nash

More Crosby / More Stills / More Nash / More Young

Sonic Grade: F

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and a Half-Speed Mastered Disaster if there ever was one.

An audiophile record dealer (of course; who else?) once raved to me about Crosby Stills and Nash on Nautilus. I said “What are you talking about? That version sucks!” He replied “No, it’s great. Helplessly Hoping sounds amazing.” 

Now one thing I know about the Nautilus is this: although it is wonderfully transparent in the midrange, it may very well take the cake for the most bloated, out of control bass in the history of Half-Speed mastering.

What song on that album has almost no bass, just lovely voices in the midrange? You guessed it. Helplessly Hoping.

The Nautilus got one track right, and ruined the rest. Using that track for comparison will fool you, and when it comes time to play a side of the album, you will quickly hear what a disaster it is.

Or maybe you won’t. Who else harps on bad Half-Speed Mastered bass outside of those of us who write for this blog? I don’t recall ever reading a word about the subject.

This does not reflect well on the bass response of the modern audiophile stereo. If you would like to improve the bass of your system, the records linked below are good for testing different aspects of bass.

Further Reading

Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.

If you are still buying these modern 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 wrong with 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.

A Cosmo’s Factory Shootout from Way Back When

More of the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

More Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Creedence Clearwater Revival

This is a very old commentary describing a shootout we had done more than a decade ago. Some of what you see below would probably still be true. The cutting system used to make the AP pressing no doubt lacked Tubey Magic. It’s also true that many of the records mastered on it were as lifeless and boring as we describe.

The only way to be clear about what is going on with the audiophile pressings in this group is to do another shootout with them, and we just can’t see taking the time to do that when there are so many good vintage pressings we don’t have time to play as it is.

There are only so many hours in the day, why waste them playing this crap?

We do occasionally throw the modern remastered pressings we happen to have on hand into our shootouts when time permits. You can read all about the half-speeds we’ve reviewed here and some of the heavy vinyl pressings we’ve played here.

Our latest thinking about this Analogue Productions repress can be found here.

Now, on to our old shootout.

Years ago a customer sent me his copy of the Analogue Productions LP (mastered by Hoffman and Gray) in order to carry out a little shootout I had planned among the five copies I could pull together: two MoFi’s, the Fantasy ORC reissue, a blue label original, the AP, and another reissue. 

Let’s just say there were no real winners, but there sure were some losers.

My take on the Hoffman version is simply this: it has virtually no trace of Tubey Analog Magic. None to speak of anyway.

It sounds like a clean, tonally correct but fairly bass-shy CD.

No pressing I played managed to be so tonally correct and so boring at the same time.

The MoFi has plenty of weird EQ colorations, the kind that bug the hell out of me on 98% of their crappy catalog, but at least it sounds like analog. It’s warm, rich and sweet.

The AP copy has none of those qualities.

More pointless 180 gram vinyl sound, to my ear anyway. I couldn’t sit through it with a gun to my head.

You would need a lot of vintage tubes in your system to get the AP record to sound right, and then every properly mastered record in your collection would sound worse.

The approach we recommend now?

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