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Labels With Shortcomings – Mobile Fidelity (Newer)

Frank Sinatra – The Ideal Audiophile Pressing

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

More of the Music of Count Basie

Mobile Fidelity may have made the perfect record for you.

This, of course, depends on who you are. More precisely, it depends on whether you care about having better sound, and whether you know how to go about acquiring pressings with better sound.

As for the MoFi you see pictured, our audition notes checked off some of its strengths, which boil down to these: it’s quiet, it’s tonally correct, and on the equipment most audiophiles will probably use to play it back, it does not seem to be especially veiled, opaque or compressed compared to many of its fellow audiophile pressings.

If you’re the kind of audiophile who doesn’t want to do the work required to find a top quality vintage pressing on his own, or buy one from us, this is actually a very good sounding record and a good way for you to go.

In that sense it is the ideal pressing for most audiophiles. If you want to know if you fit into the category of “most audiophiles,” here is one way to find out:

Ask yourself these three questions:

  1. Do you want the expense and hassle of finding a nice original stereo copy?
  2. Do you want to invest in proper record cleaning equipment to restore the glorious sound of the original’s 50-plus year old vinyl?
  3. Do you want to spend the time (decades) and money (many tens of thousands of dollars) to build and tweak a top quality analog playback system?

If you don’t want to do these things, you are not alone.

In fact, you are clearly in the majority, part of that enormously tall, fat bulge right in the middle of the bell curve. As the quintessential audiophile record lover, a big part of the mass of the mass-market, Mobile Fidelity has made the perfect record for you.

Without a better pressing to play against it, you will have no reason to suspect that anything is wrong with it.

More precisely, you will have no way to know that anything is wrong with it.

We know exactly what’s wrong with it, but that’s because we are very serious about records and audio, as serious as you can get. Who digs deeper than we do?

Now that you have failed to note its many shortcomings, the only thing remaining is for you to go to an audiophile forum and write your review, telling everyone how much better it is than whatever crappy pressing you owned and will be trading in soon.

This assumes you owned anything at all. I would be surprised if the average audiophile has a vintage copy of the album to compare with the new one, but no doubt some do.

The later reissues of the album, which are common in clean condition, give ammunition to all of those who proclaim that reissues are consistently awful. That’s often not the case, but is definitely the case in this case, with some notable exceptions. (In the world of records, there are almost always notable exceptions.)

If you want to hold the pressings you play to a higher sonic standard, we are here to help.

If setting a low bar is more your style, Mobile Fidelity has been making records for you for more than fifty years. As long as you keep buying them, they’ll keep making them. They’ve been setting the bar about as low as it can go for as long as I can remember, and the fact that they are still around is positive proof that their customers like things just fine that way. Better, probably.

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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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Thriller Is Proof that Mobile Fidelity Is Cutting Some Real Crap These Days

More of the Music of Michael Jackson

More Reviews and Commentaries for Thriller

Don’t blame the digital step for the bad sound of this pressing. If it were all analog, you can be sure Mobile Fidelity would have screwed it up every bit as badly.

If this is the sound audiophiles are interested in, lord have mercy on their souls. They must be as lost as lost can be.

Side One:

Track One: thin and small, clear but badly lacks body and punch.

Track Two: unpleasant cymbals, no real dynamics.

Side Two:

Track One: no dynamics, bright and small.

Track Three: unpleasant and small.

Two Questions

Is this the worst version of the album ever made?

Hard to imagine it would have much competition.

Are any of these Mofi One-Step pressings any good?

I seriously doubt it. Until one comes along that doesn’t sound awful, the jury is out. Those of you looking for miracles are likely to be disappointed.

Having said that, I’m sure there are audiophiles and audiophile reviewers who like the sound of this pressing and have said so online.

Based on what we heard, how on earth are these people qualified to judge the sound of records? I guess that’s three questions.

How bad does a record have to sound before they notice? Make that four, sorry.

Bernie Was The Man

Bernie Grundman cut the original pressings of Thriller. About the nicest thing we can say about him these days is that his work at one time was excellent.

Our evidence? When you hear a killer copy of Thriller — a recording with a lot going on and one that no doubt was difficult to master — the fact that nobody else has even come close to cutting the album as well as he did all those years ago stands as proof that he will always be considered one of the greats. (If he would only stop taking Chad’s calls, the record world would be in a much better place.)

Speaking of Chad, we have now auditioned the new Aja UHQR and will be posting our review soon, so stay tuned.

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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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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.

I found out recently 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.

The most obvious answer — and therefore the most likely one — is reviewer malpractice? What else could it be?

What We Think We Know

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 anything other than a minimally-acceptable Hot Stamper.

We would never bother to put such a pressing in a shootout, when even the average run-of-the-mill UK copy is better.

We Get Letters

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. Robert Brook didn’t like it either.]

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 unmount it 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.

Keep in mind that we are not saying their version is bad.

We do not judge records we have never played.

However, we would be very surprised if it were better than mediocre.

So that’s why we cannot answer your question!

Best, TP

PS

The version Chris Bellman cut for Rhino at 45 RPM in 2021 is actually quite good. I will be writing a review for it one of these days.

Here are some Hot Stamper pressings of TAS List titles that actually have audiophile sound quality, guaranteed. And if for some reason you disagree with us about how good they sound, we will be happy to give you your money back.

Here are some others that we do not think qualify as Super Discs.

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Santana’s First Album on MoFi Vinyl – We Owe You an Apology

More of the Music of Santana

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Santana

Sonic Grade: F

Santana is a record we admit to having liked when it came out back in 2007. Since then we have changed our minds. As embarrassing as it may be, and let’s be clear, this pressing is very embarrassing, We Got This One Wrong and there is no sense trying to hide it.

It’s just so 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 [now discontinued] blog on the site: “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.”

And I noted that the Abraxas they remastered 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.

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

On another note, we played some godawful sounding MoFi pressings over the last few weeks:

  • Linda Ronstadt;
  • 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.

Well, maybe so, but we are going 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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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.

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 falling for easy answers and quick fixes.

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.

Mea culpa.

Boy, 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 One True 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 from 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

Robert Brook has a blog which he calls

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED 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 copies of it 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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