Labels With Shortcomings – Mobile Fidelity (Newer)

Elvis Likes Mobile Fidelity About as Much as I Do

Excerpted from an interview in Variety.

People do seem to have caught on to “Painted” as a classic, though, even well outside the realm of your hardcore fans. I saw it on web forums where there were so many people thirsting over the two different editions of the album that Mobile Fidelity put out prior to this, calling it one of the great albums of the ’90s and clamoring to get the best available vinyl versions.

Well, I don’t have any opinion about that. I don’t hold with that company putting their name above the artist. I don’t like the way their records look. I’ve never listened to any of ’em because of that. I think there’s a huge arrogance. Because I’ve worked with the greatest, Bob Ludwig, who mastered the original record, remastered this (new Universal edition), mastered everything else. He’s the end of the story about that. So Mobile Fidelity can fuck themselves. If you put your name above the artist and above the title, what gives you the temerity to do that? You didn’t make the record.

But you must be proud of the fact that this body of work is so well-regarded…

Yeah. Apart from those copies. I’m kidding. They can do what they want with it. I mean, people are listening to it on a memory stick or whatever, you know? I guess it’s better that it exists than it doesn’t exist. It’s like when people say, are you worried about your birthday coming up? I go, you know what’s worse than having a birthday? Not having a birthday.

Hot Stamper Pressings of Elvis’s Albums Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Elvis Costello

Aimee Mann / Bachelor No. 2 – MoFi Reviewed

More Rock and Pop Personal Favorites

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another Mobile Fidelity LP incompetently mastered for the benefit of those given to looking for easy answers and quick fixes.

Mea culpa.

I had not actually played the LP when I reviewed the MoFi CD, noting that the CD sounded great and that I expected the vinyl to be even better. In 2006 I should have known better but apparently I did not.

Was I ever wrong. The vinyl has a bad case of sucked-out half-speed mids.  It’s far too polite and lifeless to be taken seriously.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Since every CD I own sounds better, that would seem to be the case.

The comments about the music of course still apply — it’s brilliant — but I recommend the Gold or regular CD over this audiophile Heavy Vinyl pressing.

I used to consider this Mann’s Masterpiece. It’s actually her co-masterpiece, taking its place alongside the amazing I’m With Stupid, which is more of the rocker side of Mann. This is her Burt Bacharach side, prettier, sweeter and more melodic. Both are brilliant.

Aimee Mann is one of a handful of artists in the ’90s who actually makes music that can hold its own against the best popular recordings of the last forty years. There are few albums that I prize more highly or that have provided me with more musical satisfaction than those by Aimee Mann.

If you don’t know her music try one or both of the above-mentioned titles. Modern pop music just doesn’t get any better.   (more…)

Robert Brook Hears Something Funny on the MoFi One-Step of B,S&T

Reviews and Commentaries for Blood, Sweat and Tears

One of our good customers has a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a review Robert Brook has just written for the MoFi One-Step pressing of one of our favorite albums of all time, BS&T’s second album.

I do not doubt for a minute that it’s every bit as awful as Robert says it is. Probably worse! I made some rather extensive notes in the comments at the end of his review you may find of interest.

Blood, Sweat & Tears: How Do MoFi’s 2 Disc 45 rpm’s STACK UP?

We’ve written quite a bit about the album, played them by the score as a matter of fact, and you can find plenty of our Reviews and Commentaries for the album on this very blog.

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.

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Robert Brook Does Abraxas Again, This Time on MoFi One-Step

More of the Music of Santana

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Santana

One of our good customers has started a blog which he calls A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to a review Robert Brook has just written for the MoFi One-Step pressing of Abraxas, the price of which now far exceeds what even the hottest stamper copies would sell for. Luckily he managed to borrow one from a friend. Had he paid good money for it, you can imagine that his review would have included a lot more exclamation marks. Bad sounding audiophile records upset me too, so I know how the man feels.

Review: Mobile Fidelity’s ABRAXAS ULTRADISC ONE STEP

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

Moments ago I did a search for this title on the web, and I could not find a single review that was less than a rave, and some audiophile reviewers were calling the One-Step one of the best sounding records they had ever played. They all agreed: analog nirvana, or something like it, has finally arrived. Thanks Mobile Fidelity! You da bomb.

I myself have never heard the pressing, and have no intention of buying one or borrowing one in order to do so.

The sound that Robert Brook describes in his review is a sound I know all too well from playing other Mobile Fidelity pressings, some of which sound bad enough they defy all understanding. After playing one of their remastered records, I frequently find myself asking the same two questions: Who are these idiots and how are they still in business?

The Linda Ronstadt record this label released in 2008 is so awful we put it on our list of Audiophile Pressings that Are the Worst Version of the Album We’ve Ever Heard. You might even think we created that category of awfulness just to have a place for records of its ilk to get the attention they deserve. You would not be far off the mark.

The Genesis album MoFi released in the early ’80s is every bit as bad, and the best part of the story we tell about their pressing is how much I used to like it. [1]

You think Modern Heavy Vinyl pressings are lifeless? Play this piece of crap and see just how bad an audiophile record can sound.

And to think I used to like this version! I hope I had a better copy back in the ’80s than the one I played a few years ago. I’ll never know of course. If you have one in your collection give it a spin. See if it sounds as bad as we say. If you haven’t played it in a while (can’t imagine why, maybe because it’s just plain awful?), you might be in for quite a shock.

As I never tire of pointing out, for the first twenty years I spent in audio I was completely lost. I sure didn’t think I was lost. I thought I had a really good system and I thought I knew a lot about records and audio.

But clearly I did not. When I read the posts of those on audiophile forums or the comments of those discussing our approach to finding better sounding records on videos and articles, I see a reflection of the foolish audiophile I used to be all those years ago. Thank goodness I didn’t have a internet access in the ’80s. I still have copies of my embarrassing catalogs from back then. Thankfully they are in a file cabinet and not up on the web for all our critics to feast upon.

Back to Robert Brook

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.

His story is not that different from my own. At the start of his journey, he found himself going in a particular audio direction. He was making some progress, but felt that he needed to take a different approach to get the sound he imagined was still eluding him.

Fighting the inertia that holds us all back in our lives, he reversed course and now finds that he is making progress by leaps and bounds, progress that surely would have been impossible had he stayed on the road he was on.

I did the same thing. I simply stopped believing what I read or was told and started testing everything for myself.

By 2004, after only 30 or so years in the hobby, that approach paid off. I had made enough progress in audio to officially start doing regular shootouts for vintage pressings I knew from experience to have top quality sound, potentially anyway. Teaser and the Firecat was the first Hot Stamper pressing we put up for sale. Our customers were ecstatic to pay ten times the going rate to get a pressing of Teaser that sounded better than they’d ever even imagined the album could sound. They wrote us lots of nice letters, more than 300 to date.

From that point on, we never looked back. Why would we? Our customers were buying Hot Stampers like they were going out of style. Records would go up on the site and sell in minutes.

Now, with a staff of ten, and having discovered much better ways of doing practically everything involved in finding Hot Stampers, not the least of which is using the knowledge we have gained from the thousands and thousands of different pressings we’ve played over the years, we feel confidant our records can hold their own against any and all comers. Especially those being produced today.

Bring it on, we say, and some audiophiles do. Most do not, but we’ve long been resigned to the fact that there’s little we can do about that situation. Even with a money back guarantee, the idea of Hot Stampers is just too absurd for some folks to wrap their heads around.

And the MoFi One-Step? I do not doubt for a minute that it’s every bit as awful as Robert says it is.

Down the road, A.B., our letter poster and source for the pressing Robert played, will no doubt come to recognize the faults that Robert lays out so clearly.

It took me a long time too.

[1] As far as Trick of the Tail goes, Live and Learn, right?

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MoFi Misses The Mark by a M I L E with Kind Of Blue

Reviews and Commentaries for Kind of Blue

Hot Stampers of Miles’s Albums Available Now

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below is a link to the review he wrote recently for one of our favorite records, Kind of Blue. (To be clear, we love the album, just not the MoFi pressing of it.)

MoFi Misses The Mark by a M I L E w/ Kind Of Blue

One of our other good customers had this to say about the Mobile Fidelity pressing:

Last night I listened to my 2015 Mobile Fidelity 45 RPM pressing.

I couldn’t get through the first cut.

Closed, muffled and flat as a pancake. No life or energy whatsoever.

I agreed and added my two cents:

My notes for their pressing read:

  • Thick, dark, flat.
  • Lacks air, space, presence.
  • Not a bad sound but it’s not right.

Later I added:

Having listened to the record more extensively, I see now I was being much too kind.

A longer review will be coming soon I hope. I think I may know why some audiophiles like the sound of this record, and will be exploring that notion in a future commentary.

The last line about the MoFi not having “a bad sound but it’s not right” reminded me of of the mistakes I made in my original review of Santana’s first album on MoFi:

Santana on MoFi – We Owe You an Apology

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Dire Straits Gets the Mobile Fidelity Treatment (Just Updated)

Reviews and Commentaries for Dire Straits’ Debut

More of the Music of Dire Straits

Geoff Edgers watched me and my lovely assistant, Sunshine, do a lengthy shootout for Dire Straits first album, but licensing problems prevented the Washington Post from using the footage. You can still see Sunshine in the video, and the yellow Phonogram label you see at one point is attached to one of the Dire Straits pressings we played that day.

Toward the end of the shootout for the first side, we put on the Mobile Fidelity pressing, and, interrupted from time to time by the sound of me howling and gnashing my teeth, I pointed out for Geoff’s edification everything that was wrong with their pressing.

This took some time.

I will be writing more about their dismal effort one of these days, but for now let me leave you with this thought.

When you read the comments section for the article, it seems that quite a number of those discussing my lifelong interest in the world of audio and records go out of their way to state the obvious, that folks my age cannot hear high frequencies.

This is true, and I have never denied it. Case in point: After playing the MoFi pressing of Dire Straits, Sunshine, sitting at the turntable, asked what all that weirdly high-pitched, swirling, shusshing sound was. It wasn’t on the Phonogram pressings she had played. Only the MoFi.

I looked at her and asked “What shusshing sound?”

Sunshine had clearly heard it, Geoff may have, I don’t remember, but I had no idea there was anything untoward happening way up in that area of the frequency range. [1]

In my defense, not that I need one, I had no trouble telling how bad that Mobile Fidelity pressing was, or which of the five Dire Straits pressings sounded the best, or what each of them were doing, rightly and wrongly. What I was noting and explaining about the sound of these identical-looking UK pressings, their strengths and weaknesses, was clear enough for everyone in the room to hear over the course of the hour or so we spent doing it.

My goal was to walk Geoff through the steps of the shootout, and as far as I could tell he was with me all the way.

Those commenting about high frequency hearing loss are engaging in the fallacy of “begging the question,” assuming what they are trying to prove instead of proving it, which I suppose is the kind of thing you can expect to read in the comments left by those with a great deal of regard for their own opinions but little for the evidence required to support them. More here.

One of our good customers, Robert Brook, has started writing a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

Below you will find his review of a record I too know a fair bit about, the first Dire Straits album on Mobile Fidelity. I hope to write my review of the Mobile Fidelity pressing soon.

Ugh! Mobile Fidelity’s Remaster of DIRE STRAITS

As of 2015, this label may have entered a new and even more disgraceful era, but considering how bad their records have been from the very start — something that should be obvious to any audiophile with a high quality playback system, a system that should have no difficulty exposing the manifold shortcomings of their remastered pressings — how much lower can they possibly fall?

Only time will tell.

[1.] Did Mobile Fidelity’s engineers hear this high-frequency hash? Will any audiophile come forward to expose this problem? The answers to both questions are very likely to be no.

Further Reading on Half-Speeds

Here’s a good question:

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

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Santana / Abraxas – MoFi Manages to Disgrace Itself Even Further

More of the Music of Santana

Reviews and Commentaries for Abraxas

Sonic Grade: F

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.

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.”

We also mentioned a while back (4/29/08) on our blog how bad the latest crop of MoFi vinyl was, with the heading: “Mobile Fidelity, Ouch.

On another note, we played some godawful sounding MOFI pressings over the last few weeks: Linda Ronstadt (which appears to be out of phase, more on that down the road); Metallica (with blobby bass at 45 RPM no less; only half-speed mastering can guarantee muddy bass under any and all circumstances!); and Rush (nothing even resembling a top end. How do these things happen?).

These three albums have to be some of the worst sounding vinyl I have ever heard in my life. I won’t waste any more of your time or mine talking about them. Buy them if you feel the need, and if you like what you hear, drop us a line. Maybe the copy we cracked open was a “bad” one, unrepresentative of the general pressing run in the same way that the latest Crisis half-speed was.

Well, maybe so, but we are going to have to leave that conundrum unsolved for the time being. To crack open more copies to see if they are all as bad as the first one we played is not something we are particularly inclined to do. We call that throwing good money after bad around here at Better Records.

This is a label making some seriously bad records these days.

But why single them out? They all are.

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Dires Straits / Brothers In Arms – Our Take on the MoFi 45

More of the Music of Dire Straits

Reviews and Commentaries for Brothers in Arms

We have never bothered to play their remaster, along with some other Heavy Vinyl reissues we think have very little chance of actually sounding good to us.

NEWSFLASH: I just found out today that the MoFi is now on the TAS Super Disc list. You can find it along with the domestic — yes, you read that right — domestic pressing of the first album.

Now just how hard of hearing do you have to be to think that the domestic pressing of Dire Straits’ first album is a Super Disc? A nice record, sure, but nice records aren’t really Super Discs, are they?

Not when there are UK pressings that trounce it. We should know, we’ve played them by the dozens. How the writers for The Absolute Sound can be this far off the mark is a question we cannot begin to answer. More Reviewer Malpractice? What else could it be?

We have written quite a number of reviews and commentaries for the first album and we encourage you to read some of them.

Speaking of Super Discs, the good British pressings are so good we put them on our Top Ten Most Tubey Magical Rock and Pop Recordings List. No domestic pressing we have ever played would qualify as a Hot Stamper, not when even the average British copy is better.

A few years ago we received this email from a customer.

“How would you compare the Brothers in Arms SHS to the Mobile Fidelity 45 rpm copy?”

Dear Sir,

We have never bothered to play their remaster, and why would we? Every MoFi pressing made by the current regime has had major sound problems when compared head to head with the “real” records we sell, and it’s simply not worth our time to find out exactly what is wrong with the sound of any of these new reissues, theirs included.

[I will be reviewing their unbelievably awful Dire Straits first album on 45 one of these days. Rarely have I heard such a good recording, a brilliant recording, turned into such a piece of crap.]

However, we have been known to make an exception to that rule from time to time. Recently we did so in the case of the Tea for the Tillerman George Marino cut at 45 RPM for Analogue Productions.

As long as Analogue Productions is around, at least no one can say that Mobile Fidelity makes the worst sounding audiophile records in the history of the world. They are certainly some of the worst, but, to be fair, they are not so bad that they have never made a single good sounding record, which is the title that Chad Kassem holds. (To the best of our knowledge. Obviously we have only played a small fraction of the records released by him. In our defense let me say that that small fraction was all we could take.)

Why not give the new Brothers in Arms a listen to see how it stacks up to your Hot Stampers?

Because Half-Speed Mastering is a bad approach to mastering, one that almost never produces good sounding records.

Even when it’s done right, it results in sloppy bass. This is very obvious to us but it seems most audiophiles and reviewers don’t notice this shortcoming. (I try not to reflect too much on systems that hide from their owners the problems in the low end that MoFi records are prone to, practically without exception. I once borrowed a $5000 Dynavector cartridge to audition. Although it had a wonderfully extended and sweet top end, clearly better than my 17D3, the bass was so sloppy I could not wait to take it out and get it back to its owner. I never said a word about it and he never complained about the bass.)

You don’t have to make the mistake of mastering your records at Half-Speed to end up with sloppy bass. You just have to be bad at mastering records, like this label, Music Matters.

We find listening to the sound of these veiled, compressed, strangely-eq’d remastered records painful, so we avoid playing them unless one comes our way for free, which does happen from time to time.

We played their Sinatra at the Sands record a few years back after someone gave us a free copy.

And it was pretty good. It might earn a sonic grade of “B.” That’s about the most you can hope for. We’ve reviewed a lot of their albums over the years, and you can read about them here: Mobile Fidelity

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Metallica / Ride The Lightning (45 RPM) – MoFi Debunked

Sonic Grade: F

This review is for the 2008 Warner Brothers 45 RPM 180g Double LP Half-Speed Mastered by Mobile Fidelity from the original analog master tapes.

Compressed, sucked-out mids, no deep bass and muddy mid-bass, the mastering of this album is an absolute disaster on every level. If you want to know how clueless the average audiophile is, a quick Google search will bring up plenty of positive comments from listeners and reviewers alike. 

Here are some other records that are good for testing the faults of this awful sounding release.

Records that Are Good for Testing Bass Definition 

Records that Are Good for Testing Compression 

Records that Are Good for Testing Midrange Presence 

FURTHER READING

Here are some of our reviews and commentaries concerning the many Heavy Vinyl pressings we’ve played over the years, well over 200 at this stage of the game. Feel free to pick your poison.

Heavy Vinyl Commentaries

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Little Feat / Dixie Chicken – How Does the MoFi Sound?

Little Feat Albums We’ve Reviewed

How does the MoFi pressing sound?

We have no idea; we’ve never bothered to order one, for at least one very good reason. This is an album about rhythm.

Half-Speed mastered records have sloppy bass and, consequently, lack rhythmic drive.

Who is his right mind would want to half-speed master an album by Little Feat, one of the most rhythmically accomplished bands in rock and roll history?

The obvious answer is that it was a bad idea. But, if you’re Mobile Fidelity, and that’s the only idea you’ve ever had because you are in the half-speed mastering business, then what else can you do?

As the old saying goes, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.

OUR PREVIOUS HOT STAMPER COMMENTARY

Folks, this is no demo disc by any means, but the later pressings strip away the two qualities that really make this music work and bring it to life: Tubey Magic and Big Bass. This side two has both in SPADES.

Listen to how breathy and transparent the chorus is on the first track. Now layer that sound on top of a fat and punchy bottom end and you have the formula for Little Feat Magic at its funky best. This is the sound they heard in the control room, of that I have no doubt, and it is all over this side two. No side of any copy we played was better.

Personally

The All Music Guide (and lots of other critics) think this is Little Feat at their best. With tracks such as Two Trains, Dixie Chicken, Fat Man in the Bathtub and Roll Um Easy, who’s gonna disagree!? (I guess I am. I prefer Waiting for Columbus and The Last Record Album but cannot deny that Dixie Chicken is probably the best of the albums that came before them.)

Some Relevant Commentaries

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