MFSL (Older)

Labels With Shortcomings – Mobile Fidelity (Older)

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.

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Stan Ricker’s Fingers Are All Over these Paintings

Hot Stamper Pressings of Jazz Guitar Recordings Available Now

We have been planning on doing a shootout for this Earl Klugh’s 1977 Blue Note release, Finger Paintings, for more than a year, and over that time we were fortunate enough to pick up a MoFi pressing of the album locally for the very reasonable price of ten bucks. (The price tag on the jacket is visible at the bottom of this post.)

The notes for our 2025 Shootout Winner included phrases such as “huge, weighty and punchy, ” along with “natural, rich and sweet.” Most copies may not have those qualities, but the best ones sure do.

Contrast that with the Mobile Fidelity pressing that Stan Ricker mastered in 1980. It was one of their biggest early sellers, and one that they no doubt felt had such good sound that it would be sure to sell at triple the price of the regular Mobile Fidelity pressing!

WTF you say? Yes, it would be released in 1981 in a box (not a box set!) as a Numbered, Limited Edition, Ultra High Quality Record (UHQR) at the retail price of $50. $178 in 2026 dollars, if you can believe that records used to cost that kind of dough (cough).

OK, that’s all well and good, but this is supposed to be a blog for audiophiles, so forget all that history stuff and just tell us what the record sounds like.

Fair enough. After having played a big batch of standard issue pressings and getting to know the sound of the record well, feast your eyes on the notes we took.

This MoFi may actually set a new standard for screwing up a perfectly good sounding record. (I was going to say tape but I have never heard the tape and have no idea what it sounds like. John Golden (JG) at Kendun cut the originals. Maybe he was able to somehow make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The possibility exists.)

Side One

Track Four

  • Really sucked out and clean
  • How bizarrely awful!

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Does Year of the Cat on Mobile Fidelity Have Audiophile Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Al Stewart Available Now

Our answer, judging by the copy we played not long ago, would be solidly in the negative. The final grade we awarded both sides was No, our way of saying the record is Not Good.

Below is a description for what a top copy of the album sounds like, based on our most recent shootout:

Incredible sound throughout this vintage Janus pressing of Stewart’s 1976 Masterpiece. With engineering by Alan Parsons, the top pressings are every bit the audiophile Demo Discs you remember. The best sides have sweet vocals, huge amounts of space, breathtaking transparency, and so much more.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

But if you own the wrong Mobile Fidelity pressing — this one was reissued in 1981, the original came out in 1978, so there may be some other pressings that sound better than this one — you would never know how good sounding the album can be. We put a copy we had laying around in a shootout recently and the results were, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty painful.

As the notes make clear, the Mobile Fidelity pressing, with the stampers you see on the sheet above, is:

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With The Beatles on Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Sonic Grade: C+

The MoFi pressing of With the Beatles has so many problems it would take an hour to describe them all. Suffice it to say, it’s thinner and brighter, with voices that are grittier and grainier. The overall effect is the sinking feeling that you are listening to a cheap reissue and not the real thing. Don’t the Beatles sound better than this? To be fair, some tracks are okay, others a disaster.

If you own the MoFi, play it. Listen to it carefully. Make notes of which songs sound better than others and why. That’s how we spend our days, evaluating the relative merits of various pressings, and it’s that and that alone that has given us the critical listening skills necessary to recognize and appreciate the differences among the records we play.

One of the biggest problems with the average Parlophone copy is just the reverse of the MOFI. They tend to have rolled off highs, which emphasizes the harshness in the upper midrange and causes a loss of transparency. (The best Hot Stamper copies are of course as smooth, sweet, and transparent as they come.) Even with those shortcomings though, I would still rather listen to a typical Parlophone pressing. I wouldn’t be frustrated by the sound of somebody fooling with the EQ and screwing it up.  (more…)

Imagine on Mobile Fidelity from 1984

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

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Who on Earth Could Possibly Take the Sound of this Ridiculous Remaster Seriously?

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca and London Available Now

There actually is such a person who does exactly that, can you imagine?

Only an Audiophile True Believer could be fooled by sound so ridiculously unnatural.

But the world is full of such people. They bought into the audiophile BS of Mobile Fidelity in the 80s and apparently haven’t learned much since.

Now they think Heavy Vinyl is the answer to the world’s problems. The more things change…

If your stereo is any good at all, you should have no trouble hearing the sonic qualities of this album we describe below. If you are on this blog, and you have tried some of our Hot Stamper pressings, there is a good chance you’re hearing pretty much what we’re hearing. Why else why would you pay our prices?

One thing I can tell you: we would never charge money for a record that sounds as weird and wrong as this MoFi.

A well-known reviewer has many kind things to say about this pressing, but we think it sounds like a hi-fi-ish version of a 70s London, which means it’s opaque and the strings are badly lacking in Tubey Magical sheen and richness.

The bass is like jello on the MoFi, unlike the real London, which has fairly decent bass.

If an audiophile reviewer cannot hear the obvious faults of this pressing, I would say there’s a good chance one or both of the following is true:

  1. His equipment is not telling him what the record is really doing, and/or,
  2. His listening skills are not sufficiently developed to notice the shortcomings in the sound.

The result is the worst kind of reviewer malpractice.

But is it really the worst kind? It seems to be the only kind!

MoFi had a bad habit of making bright classical records. I suppose you could say they had a bad habit of making bright records in general. A few are dull, some are just right, but most of them are bright in one way or another.

Dull playback equipment? An attempt to confuse detail with resolution? Whatever the reasons, the better and more accurate your equipment becomes, the more obvious this shortcoming will be. My tolerance for their phony EQ is at an all time low. But hey, that’s me.

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Please Please Me on MoFi – Another Disgracefully Spitty Half-Speed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

Sonic Grade: C

If you own the Mobile Fidelity LP, do yourself a favor and buy one of our Hot Stamper pressings. (Actually any good British import pressing will do.)

What’s the first thing you will notice other than correct tonality, better bass and a lot more “life” overall?

No spit!

As we’ve commented elsewhere, because of the wacky cutting system they used, Mobile Fidelity pressings are full of sibilance. 

As I was playing a British pressing of this record many years ago, maybe by about the fifth or sixth song it occurred to me that I hadn’t been hearing the spit that I was used to from my MoFi LP. You don’t notice it when it’s not there.

But your MoFi sure has a bad case of spitty vocals. If you never noticed them before, you will now.

We discuss the sibilance problems of MoFi records all the time. Have you ever read Word One about this problem elsewhere? Of course not.

Audiophiles and audiophile reviewers just seem to put up with these problems, or ignore them, or — even worse — fail to recognize them at all.

Play around with your table setup for a few hours and you will no doubt be able to reduce the severity of the sibilance on your favorite test and demo discs. All your other records will thank you for it too.

Especially your Beatles records. Many Beatles pressings are spitty, and the MoFi Beatles pressings are REALLY spitty. Of course MoFi fans never seem to notice this fact. Critical listening skills and a collection of MoFi pressings are rarely if ever found together. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone spending time on this site, you either have one or the other.

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In the Court of the Crimson King – A Very Good Pressing from Mobile Fidelity

Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now

The MoFi pressing shown here is surely one of their best.

Unfortunately, these days we have little tolerance for the dynamic compression, overall lifelessness and wonky bass heard on practically every record they ever mastered. Including this one.

One of the reasons your MoFi might not sound wrong to you is that it isn’t really “wrong.” It’s doing most things right, and it will probably beat most of what you can find to throw at it. A quick survey:

If you have the Atlantic pressing, from any era, you have never begun to hear this record at its best. It was cleary mastered from copy tapes, which is where its dubby sound comes from.

UK Polydor reissue? Passable, not really worth the labor to put them in a shootout just to have them earn mediocre grades.

The same can be said for some of the earliest UK Pink Label Island pressings.

None of them has ever won a shootout and probably none ever will. As a rule, we don’t buy them, for two related reasons:

  1. They are quite expensive in clean condition, and
  2. Their sound quality does not justify paying the premium price sellers typically ask.

We leave them to the record collectors who like to collect originals.

We and our customers are audiophiles. We like to collect records with good sound.

If we have our heads on straight, we don’t care what pressing we buy as long as it’s the one with the best sound. 

Back to the MoFi

It’s lacking some important qualities, and a listen to one of our Hot Stampers will allow you to hear exactly what you’re not getting when you play an audiophile pressing, any audiophile pressing, even one as good as MoFi’s.

Side by side the comparison will surely be striking. How much energy, size, power and passion is missing from the record you own?

There’s only one way to find out, and it’s by playing a better copy of the album.  (more…)

Letter of the Week – “Just enough midrange to give the impression there was a good recording back in there somewhere”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music Al Stewart Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a record he played a while back:

Hey Tom, 

I know you’ve got this on my Want List, but I also know it is a hard one to find. So thought I would try a cheap used MoFi from Discogs. Cover was shot so didn’t cost much, what the heck, right? Wow, what a lesson! Clean and quiet is the best I can say. Forget about it being almost too warped to play, that was not described, but almost beside the point. What we care about is sound quality, and this MoFi is abysmal!

I mean never mind Hot Stamper, it does not compare even to my old original random played-a-million times copy! The sound is pallid, sapped of all life, rolled off on the top, missing entirely on the bottom, and with just enough midrange to give the impression there was a good recording back in there somewhere, once upon a time. Before MoFi stepped all over it.

That’s not even the worst! Track 2, On the Border, begins with two piano notes alternating back and forth setting the tempo. Where are they??? There is no piano! None! Strings come suddenly out of nowhere! I thought MoFi was supposed to use Original Master Tape??

Easily the worst MoFi ever. Although quite honestly none of them can hold a candle to one of your Hot Stampers. Genuine diamonds in the rough.

Anyway, thought I would let you know. Good luck finding my YOTC. Truly would love to hear what it’s supposed to sound like. (more…)

We Review the MoFi Pressing of Let It Be

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

This review was probably written about fifteen years ago, so we can’t say we would agree with the grade we awarded the album at the time.

Sonic Grade: B or B-

Although I haven’t played my copy in quite a while — it might have been as far back as 2007 or 2008 that I last listened to it if memory serves — I recall that it struck me as one of their better titles.

All things considered, it’s actually pretty good, assuming your copy sounds like mine (an assumption we really can’t make of course — no two records sound the same — but for the purposes of this review we’re going to assume it anyway). I would give it a “B” or “B-“.

It can’t hold a candle to the real thing, but at least MoFi didn’t ruin it like they did with so many of the other Beatles albums, especially this ridiculously phony, bright and compressed one.

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