Half-Speed Mediocrities

Blood Sweat and Tears – Direct Disc Labs Half-Speed Reviewed

More of the Music of Blood, Sweat and Tears

Reviews and Commentaries for Blood, Sweat and Tears

Sonic Grade: C [not sure it would rate that highly today, my guess it would not]

Back in the ’80s, I thought this DD Labs version smoked domestic copies, because the only domestic copy I had ever bought was a bad sounding one. This was many years before I came to understand that no two domestic copies were the same and that there were dozens of pressing variations.

I believe it was not until about 1990 that I heard my first Hot Stamper of BS&T. Oddly enough, those stamper numbers managed to best all comers for about the next 15 years. Now we know that although they can be awesome, there is actually another stamper that is potentially even better. It’s so good in fact that it has been awarded our Four Plus grade. 

The reason this pressing doesn’t get a lower grade is that, regardless of how compressed and veiled the sound is, the average Columbia pressing is surely no better.

When it comes to finding your own great sounding pressing, sure, you can do it, but it’s a lot of hard work. I’m guessing most of you already have a job and don’t need another one. I do this for a living as well as for a hobby, so I’m willing to put in the time and effort to slog through all the trash in order to find the treasure.

Also, we have a big advantage over our customers. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. I have a big head start on all of you. I know many stampers that are good and many that are bad. I found out the hard way. On BS&T I know exactly which copies to buy and which copies to avoid. I have literally played more than 100 copies of this record.

This is true for scores if not hundreds of other albums. Why did I bother to listen to so many different pressings? The overriding reason is because I wanted to find a better sounding version for myself.

It’s not worth the effort if it’s not music you love.

This is also the reason you will never find Hot Stamper pressings of some artists’ records on the site. I don’t like their music and I will just never make the effort to listen to enough pressings of their albums in order to find a hot one.

[Most of this was written way back in 2005.]

Further Reading

Half-Speed Mastered Disasters

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The Crusaders / Chain Reaction – MoFi Reviewed

More Jazz Fusion Records with Hot Stampers

This is a Mobile Fidelity LP with relatively good sound. We did a mini-shootout many years ago and this copy apparently killed the competition. 

However…

When you play the MoFi against an actual honest-to-goodness properly mastered and pressed vintage LP – we call them Hot Stampers – the audiophile version of the album reeks of phony top end EQ, compression and sloppy bass.

Of course, what half-speed mastered record doesn’t?

Further Reading

The best place to start is here:

How come you guys don’t like Half-Speed Mastered records?

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Fly Like an Eagle – Decent at Best on Mobile Fidelity

More of the Music of Steve Miller

The top end of this album is a problem on most pressings — dry and somewhat brittle — but on the best pressings the highs are extended, sweet and fairly natural. The soundfield is open and transparent with three-dimensional space that brings out the “trippy” sound the band threw in all over this album.

The MoFi has a bit more going on up top than most domestic pressings (forget the dubby imports) but the combination of blurry bass and compressed, lifeless sound fail to let this album sound the way you remember it in your head from back in the day.

Finding a good sounding copy of this record is not easy. Most of them sound like they’re playing underwater.

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Blind Faith – MoFi Reviewed

More of the Music of Eric Clapton

Hey, you could do worse!

UPDATE 2026

By the time we got around to doing a shootout for this album in 2009, it was already clear to us that even the Half-Speeds we used to consider good — like this one — were a joke next to the real thing, in this case the right UK pressing.

Our latest shootout this time around (07/09) left us with a fairly large serving of egg on our face concerning the commentary we had written for the MoFi pressing of Blind Faith, a textbook example of We Was Wrong.

It’s rich and sweet with SHOCKINGLY GOOD SOUND. MFSL did a masterful job with this one, I’d put it in the top 10 MoFi’s of all-time!

I regret to say that none of that is true.

Blind Faith has many of the same problems as the later Japanese-pressed MoFis like Thick As A Brick and Meddle, which we discuss below.

About Thick As A Brick we wrote:

As we noted last time we listed the MoFi LP:

“This MoFi is super TRANSPARENT and OPEN, and the top end should sound 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 Thick As A Brick. 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 can’t rock, so what exactly is it good for?

Like Meddle, one of the last of the MoFi titles to be pressed in Japan, it’s a pale shadow of the real thing. It has no business in the collection of any audiophile worth his salt. If you want to hear this music right, let us get you a Hot Stamper pressing. It’s guaranteed to blow your mind. We’ll even take your MoFi in trade and sell it to some unsuspecting audiophile who still buys into that Half-Speed Mastered nonsense. [This offer expired in about 2007.]

Further Reading

Year Of The Cat – Is the MoFi Good or Bad?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Stewart Available Now

Sonic Grade: D to B-

If you own the typical MoFi version of this album you happen to own one of the All Time Mastering Disasters of the modern era. Ridiculously boosted at both ends, their version is all but unlistenable on a high end stereo. 

Some copies are worse than others, so we are conservatively giving MoFi’s pressing a sonic grade of D. We’ve played some in the past that clearly deserved an F (F as in Failing), but we also once played one that sounded pretty good, which we describe below. If you’ve played half a dozen MoFi copies and plucked out the best one, yours might be good too. If you haven’t heard a bunch, chances are slim that yours is any better than awful.

There’s only one way to tell of course, and that’s to pull it off the shelf and give it a spin. You may be shocked at just how hyped-up it has gotten since the last time you heard it.

If you play your records back on an old console, with maybe a blown woofer or two, okay, I can see how the sound of the MoFi might work. But I’m guessing most of you have something better than that, and since you do, one of our Hot Stamper pressings will absolutely positively blow your mind, showing you the real Year of the Cat. We guarantee it. (more…)

From Elvis in Memphis – MoFi Reviewed

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Elvis Presley

Sonic Grade: B-? C+?

As you can imagine, this album changed everything for Elvis. I first heard it the way I heard so many albums back in the late ’70s and early ’80s: on the Mobile Fidelity pressing.

I was an audiophile record collector in 1981 when this album was remastered and if MoFi was impressed enough with the sound and the music to offer the album to their dedicated fans, of which I was clearly one, then who was I to say no to music I had never heard?

Soon enough I would learn my lesson about MoFi’s A&R department. The MoFi release of Supersax Plays Bird, a record that had virtually nothing going for it, was the last time I took their advice seriously.

Turns out, they did a pretty good job on the Elvis album, not that I would have had any way to know that. Back then it would never have occurred to me to buy a standard RCA pressing and compare it to my Half Speed mastered with tender loving care, pressed-in-Japan, double-the-price-of-a-regular disc LP.

A decade or thereabouts later it would be obvious to me that MoFi had fooled around with the sound and that the right (heavy accent on the word “right”) real RCA pressing would be more correct and more natural (though probably not as quiet of course, but advances in cleaning technology fixed most of that and left MoFi in the dust). (more…)