Half-Speed Disasters

Linked here are more than 100 Half-Speed mastered records that have exceptionally poor sound compared to the Hot Stamper pressings we’ve auditioned, which inludes both vintage early pressings and reissues.

On this blog we detail precisely what problems Half-Speed mastering causes. These hundred or so pressings are proof of the damage it can do to perfectly good recordings.

The Most Serious Fault of the Typical Half-Speed Mastered LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary must be fairly old because we haven’t bothered to play anything put out by Sundazed in longer than I can remember.

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. The average Sundazed record 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? (Apparently the guy who wrote this absurd list of records you should buy It has a number of inexcusably at best mediocre and mostly awful sounding Sundazed records.)

But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.

So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.

But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.

(more…)

MoFi Proves Once Again It Has No Idea How to Make a Good Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Women Who Rock Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Learning to Crawl and wrote down our impressions as the record was playing that you see below.

We try to be very specific about the strengths and weaknesses of the records we play, which is why we reproduce our notes — in this case for audiophile records — whenever possible. (There are plenty of shootout notes for vintage pressings on the blog as well.)

The title at the top of our post-it sets the stage for what you are about to read: the specific faults of an “especially bad MoFi.”

Do they make any other kind? Well, sometimes, to be sure, but the good ones are few and far between.

It must be hard to make a record sound this bad, but if anyone can do it, Mobile Fidelity has proven that they are the men and women for the job. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Side One

Dull drums at intro.
Bass compressed and wooly.
Vocal present and hard.
Everything else recessed.

Side Two

Very dry snare and guitar.
Flat, edgy and lifeless.
Not even clear.
Just shitty.
Lacks bass here too.

Consensus

NFG.

This one definitely belongs in the Mobile Fidelity hall of shame (along with 66 of their other titles). My CD sounds better.

To aid you in understanding just how lost the buyers of these audiophile records are these days — and who am I to talk? — we reproduce the five most recent reviews from Discogs as of 5/2026 below.

(more…)

Double Vision – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of Classic Rock Albums Available Now

This title is yet another record that belongs in the audiophile hall of shame.

Like most Mobile Fidelity pressings, it’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past.

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 MoFi’s of that period, notably The Doors (#051) and Trick of the Tail (#062), which is perhaps the most lifeless record this ridiculous label ever released.

Is there any doubt that the newer MoFi pressing of the album will be every bit as bad or worse? (more…)

Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection.

As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how badly MoFi had ruined the sound, I was mortified.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. Thrilled to it even. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

(more…)

We Drop the Needle on Another Sad Excuse for an Audiophile Pressing

More on the Subject of Half-Speed Mastering

This is an A&M Audiophile Sampler, made in Canada and pressed on Japanese vinyl .

There is a bit of a story behind this title. It’s not the kind of record we normally would buy, or even bother to play truth be told.

A customer had emailed us saying it sounded great. It was cheap so we grabbed one for fun. Our notes read:

  • Sucked out middle
  • Clean and hard (maybe like a CD?)
  • This sucks

Hard to imagine one of our customers liked the sound of this pressing, but I assure you that one of them did, so make of that what you will.

(more…)

Remastered, But Why on Earth Would They Bother?

New to the Blog? Start Here

Supersax Plays Bird is awful music with awful sound.

In 1980 this record single-handedly convinced me that MoFi would lower themselves to remastering records that have little in the way of actual musical value.

UPDATE 2022

I just looked up the mastering engineer credited with cutting the original pressings in 1973, Wally Traugott. Now what are the chances that Stan Ricker cut this record better than Wally Traugott? One in a million? That would be my guess.

Which simply means that the right domestic pressing on Capitol might just be a good sounding record.

But why should anyone care? The music is hopeless.

(more…)

Tell It Like It Is – Another A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Benson Available Now

The Half-Speed is pretty — pretty lifeless if you ask me, in the way that so many Half-Speed mastered records are.

It’s cut very clean, but until you play a good A&M pressing, you don’t know how much meat has been stripped from the bones. The best A&M pressings sound like a Rudy Van Gelder recording, which, of course, they are.

These A&M Half-Speeds suffer from all the same shortcomings that other Half-Speeds suffer from: the kind of pretty but lifeless and oh-so-boring sound that we describe in listing after listing.

(more…)

On this MoFi Anadisc, We Can Save You a Hundred Bucks, Maybe More!

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Moody Blues Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This awful sounding MoFi record from 1995 typically sells in used condition for about a hundred dollars.

A hundred bucks! For this piece of trash?

Yes, it’s true, record collectors are paying those prices for some of the murkiest, muddiest analog we have ever heard. A subset of these record collectors consider themselves audiophiles, but we cannot understand how any “lover of sound” could find this sound lovable. (We admit we gave up trying to understand it long ago.)

Take our word for it — you are getting nothing for your money, regardless of how little or how much you pay for it.

If you scroll to the bottom of this post you can find the Discogs stats for this pressing — how many have it, how many want it, what they pay for it on average –as of March, 2026.

We were shocked at the poor quality of MoFi’s Anadisq series right from the get-go. Our original review from the 90s follows:

Pure Anadisc murky mud, like all the Moody Blues records MoFi remastered and ruined in the 90s with their misbegotten foray back into the world of vinyl. By 1999 they were bankrupt and deservedly so.

Their records were completely worthless to those of us who play LPs and want to hear them sound good but, unsurprisingly, a quick search on ebay or Discogs indicates that they’re still worth money to those who collect the kind of audiophile trash this label has been putting out for decades. We don’t understand it.

(more…)

Thick As a Brick on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jethro Tull Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

Here you will find the same problems as the MoFi Meddle, released the previous year, 1984. Here is what we had to say about it back in the day when we were selling this kind of crap.

The MoFi is TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end will be lush and extended. If you prize clarity, this is the one.

But if you prize clarity at the expense of everything else, you are seriously missing the boat on Meddle (and of course Thick As A Brick too).

The MoFi is all mids and highs with almost nothing going on below.

This is a rock record, but without bass and dynamics the MoFi pressing doesn’t rock, so why would anyone want to own it or play it?

The one thing these pressings have going for them is that they tend to be transparent in the midrange.

It sounds like someone messed with the sound, and of course someone did. That’s how they get those audiophile records to sound the way they do.

For some reason, some audiophiles like their records to sound pretty and lifeless with blurry bass.

The whomp factor on this pressing is Zero. Since whomp is critical to the sound of this album, it’s Game Over for us.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with shortcomings like these and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with records that sound the way this one does.

(more…)

Breakfast in America – An A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

This title is yet another Half-Speed we think belongs in our audiophile hall of shame.

It’s better suited to the stone age stereos of decades past. I should know — my system in 1976 was one-tenth as revealing as the one we use now.

But this pressing is so awful even my old system could not be fooled by this kind of audiophile BS sound. The console you see pictured might be the ideal system to play it. Hard to say, I haven’t heard one of those since the 60s.

It is just ridiculous that someone would consider marketing this kind of sound to audiophiles.

So washed out, brittle, thin and lifeless, it practically defies understanding that anyone with two working ears ever considered calling this piece of crap an “audiophile” record.

But are today’s remastered records marketed to those looking for superior sound any better? Not the ones we’ve played recently. (If you know of any good ones, please drop us a line.)

Is this A&M pressing the worst version of the album ever made? It’s hard to imagine it would have much competition.

(more…)