Half-Speed Masters

Half-speed mastered recordings.

Ziggy Stardust – MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Bowie Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The MoFi pressing is decent, probably better than the average domestic copy I suppose, since those are clearly made from dubbed tapes.

The colorations and limitations of their cutting system would make it far too painful for me to listen to it though, especially the sloppy bass and dynamic compression.

You can do worse but you sure can do a whole lot better, hence the C grade.

MoFi did two of the greatest Bowie albums of all time, Ziggy and Let’s Dance, and neither one of them can hold a candle to the real thing. If you want to settle for a mediocre imitation of either or both of those albums, stick with Mobile Fidelity.

If you want to hear the kind of Demo Disc sound that Bowie’s records are capable of, try a Hot Stamper pressing. It’s guaranteed to blow your mind or your money back.

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With Abraxas, MoFi Manages to Disgrace Itself Even Further

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Santana Available Now

The remastered Abraxas never got past the first elimination round; it had to have been one of the worst half-speeds I have ever heard. Dead, dead, dead as a doornail.

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

Santana’s first album on MoFi is a record we admit to having liked a bit when it first came out. Since then we have changed our minds. It’s just too damn compressed and lifeless. The Whomp Factor on this pressing is Zero. Since whomp is critical to the sound of Santana’s music, it’s Game Over for us. The review below is exactly what we wrote at the time the record came in. We tried to like it, but it’s clear to us now that we tried to like it too hard. Please accept our apologies.

I noted in my old blog: “But now I would have to say that the MoFi LP is far too lifeless to be acceptable to anyone, even those with the worst kinds of audiophile BS systems.”

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Letter of the Week – “Better Records has completely transformed my relationship with music listening…”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Charles Mingus Available Now

Our good customer ab_ba decided to write us a letter, this being his third anniversary of being sold on the reality of Hot Stampers. (I have taken the liberty of editing some of it.)

Dear Tom and Fred,

Today marks my third anniversary of being your customer. It’s quite a milestone! Frankly, when I realized it’s only been three years, I was surprised. It has felt longer. I really want to thank you both, and I thought I’d take a moment to look back on it all.

    • Better Records has completely transformed my relationship with music listening, in so many ways it’s hard to enumerate them all. Great sounding records, of course, but so much more.
    • A fantastic stereo that’s so good that for the first time ever leaves me with zero desire to change anything about it.
    • A better understanding of how to attain music worth listening to.
    • Specific albums and musicians I would not have known about, that I now really treasure.
    • And, most surprising of all, some exceptionally good friends who I cherish as people, and not just as fellow travelers along this esoteric path.

For me personally, getting great sound at home was always a somewhat-angsty quest: “there must be something better.”

I sense that others feel that way about it too. But now, for me, my music listening is pure satisfaction. And that is thanks entirely to you.

Looking back on it with some nostalgia, I thought I’d note some of the milestones so far:

My first purchase was a Super Hot Stamper of Mingus Ah Um, for $300. I still viscerally remember the feeling when I made that purchase. I remember putting it on for the first time, and having the sound just explode out of my tiny B&W speakers, like nothing I had heard before.

It was so different from my MoFi One-Step of Ah Um, I instantly had all of my preconceptions shattered.
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Time Loves a Hero May Be Transparent in the Midrange, But So What?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Little Feat Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

After playing a killer Hot Stamper pressing of the album many years ago, we wrote the following: 

If you own the Nautilus Half-Speed, a record we actually liked years ago even after we had forsworn those kinds of pressings, you are really in for a treat. THIS is what the band sounds like in the REAL world, not the phony audiophile world that so many of our fellow hobbyists appear to be perfectly happy living in.

Just listen to how punchy the drums are on the real pressings, a perfect example of what proper mastering does well and Half-Speed mastering does poorly.

When you listen to a top quality pressing, you feel that you are hearing this music EXACTLY the way Little Feat wanted it to be heard. I just don’t get that vibe from the Half-Speed.

I was fooled back in the day myself. 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 sloppy bass.

That is not our sound here at Better Records. We don’t offer records with those qualities and we don’t think audiophiles should have to put up with sound like that.

Further Reading on the subject of Half-Speed mastering

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This MoFi Makes My Head Hurt

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Richard Strauss Available Now

Is the painting on the cover that of a man whose head is suffering from the ridiculously shrill string tone of this MoFi?

Doubtful. Impossible actually. But that’s exactly how my head feels when I play one of these awful MoFi classical LPs.

Their rock, pop and jazz remasters were hit and miss in the old days, with some real winners hidden amongst the junk, but their classical releases that I’ve played, without exception, was a dog.

Want a good way to know you’re dealing with bad records and collector mentality?

When you find one of these records in your local used record store, it is almost guaranteed to be pristine.

Good records get played. MoFi’s classical releases, like plenty of other classical records audiophiles found attractive, got collected and spent most of their days sitting on a shelf, out to pasture so to speak.

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MoFi Sure Added Plenty of Sparkle to These Acoustic Guitars

Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Ry Cooder Available Now

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

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

You’ve got to be 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 bother 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 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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You Mean to Say You Don’t Have the Nautilus Half-Speed in Your Collection?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Cars Available Now

A well-known audiophile reviewer posted pictures of the Cars albums you see below.

As would be expected, it looks like he has rounded up the usual suspects from his collection:

  • A domestic pressing (probably), perhaps even an early one.
  • A Japanese pressing.
  • A Mobile Fidelity pressing (notice how contrasty the jacket photo is), and
  • The Rhino Heavy Vinyl pressing, which we reviewed recently here.

What are the chances that any of these pressings are any good?

Let me guess. One out of four?

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On Dark Side of the Moon, “Breathe” Is a Good Check for Midrange Tonality

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Pink Floyd Available Now

Breathe is my favorite test track for side one for any version of Dark Side Of The Moon, Half-Speed or otherwise. When the voices come in about halfway through the song, you can tell that most copies are too bright simply by listening to the vocals on this track. The cymbals might sound wonderful; lots of other instruments might sound wonderful; and there might be plenty of ambience, detail and transparency.

But all of that counts for nothing if the voices don’t sound right.

And far too many copies have the voices sounding bright, aggressive, grainy and transitory. (This is unfortunately the case with the 180 gram 30th anniversary edition. That pressing will wake up a sleepy stereo, but my stereo hasn’t been sleepy enough to play that recut for a very long time, and I hope you can say the same.)

The discussion below may shed light on some of the issues involved in the remastering of Dark Side.

Of course, most audiophiles are still under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity, with their strict ‘quality control’, which they spend hundreds of words explaining on their inner sleeves, eliminates pressing variations of these kinds.

Isn’t that the reason for Limited Edition Audiophile Records in the first place? The whole idea is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Copy money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 99% of what we do around here would be a waste of time.

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Chicago Transit Authority on MoFi

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Chicago Available Now

The last time I played a copy of the MoFi Chicago debut was at least twenty years ago. The all tube system I had back then was much darker and dramatically less resolving than the one I have now, having made score upon score of improvements in every area of reproduction in the interim.

I actually had some nice things to say about it. I didn’t find it too bright the way so many MoFi pressings are. Here’s what I wrote all those years ago:

What do we like about this MoFi?

For one thing it doesn’t have the phony boosted top end most of their pressings do. It was mastered by Jack Hunt, not Stan Ricker, and Jack Hunt likes to EQ his projects without all the extra top end that made Mobile Fidelity famous. (Great for dull speakers, don’t you know.)

The other thing this MoFi has going for it is tons of weight down where it needs it, in the all-important lower midrange, and extending well into the mid-bass area.

Chicago is about brass and you want that brass to have weight and power.

So many domestic copies are leaned out, and many are hard sounding. On both counts this MoFi excels over copies with those problems. Our White Hot Stamper was definitely better, but we don’t find those very often, not to mention the fact that we happened to charge a ton of money for it.

I did take issue with the MoFi bass though.

This is where your MoFi falls apart, as good as it may be in other areas.

There IS no lower octave of bass on their pressing.

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So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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