MFSL (Older)

Labels With Shortcomings – Mobile Fidelity (Older)

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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Mobile Fidelity – The Ultimate Pretender

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jackson Browne Available Now

During the recording of The Pretender, a newly invented piece of electronics was used called the Aphex Aural Exciter. It harmonically “richened” the sound in interesting and, most would say, pleasing ways.

It was designed to have a euphonic effect, and it succeeded in that aim, beguiling its listeners for a while, especially those at the lo- and mid-fi level, the obvious if unspoken target market these days (although the thought of admitting such a thing would surely cause the sky to fall) for the Heavy Vinyl reissue.

The Aphex was clearly creating distortions, but they were the kinds of distortions that many folks of the audiophile persuasion seemed to like. Which is the very definition of euphonic colorations.

The poster boy for euphonic colorations is our friend here, the famous Mac 30, an amp that came on the market in 1954 and one that still has adherents to this day, some of them quite famous. I had a pair and learned some lessons — as I did with every piece of equipment I owned — in the time I spent listening to them.

If you like old school tubey colorations, the kind we’ve found to be antithetical to the proper reproduction of music in the home, this is the amp for you.

How Much Is Too Much of a Good Thing?

When you play the MoFi pressing of The Pretender, it just seems to have more of that Aphex Aural Excitement.

Here’s the $64,000 question: is MoFi’s supposedly superior mastering technology revealing more of the “aphexy” sound already present on the tapes, or is it adding its own distortions that mimic the Aphex distortions?

It seems to me that in the case of The Pretender it’s clearly the latter.

Deja Vu on MoFi has that same too rich, too smooth sound. Where on earth did that extra richness and smoothness come from? No vintage pressings we have ever played has ever had that sound.

Obviously MoFi preferred The Pretender to sound the way they preferred it to sound, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they wanted it to sound the way they thought their customers would prefer it to sound.

Or maybe they have no idea what they’re doing and never did. That strikes me as the most likely explanation for a label that should have gone out of business a long time ago.

Is it just EQ? I’m not expert enough to know, but I do know this: Hot Stamper pressings of The Pretender have much more transparency and clarity, while at the same time offering a good balance of of sweetness and smoothness, with less of that thick, blurry, overly-rich quality that you find on the MoFi pressings of the album.

More on the Aphex

Owen Penglis on the Happymag.tv site describes the Aphex Aural effect this way:

The Aural Exciter brought presence, intelligibility, ‘air’ without hiss, and renewed clarity through its arbitrary process of adding phase shift, harmonics, compression, and intermodular distortion.

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Half-Speed Mastering – A Technological Fix for a Non-Existent Problem

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joe Jackson Available Now

UPDATE

This commentary was written many years ago. We had a Hot Stamper Section back then, because we were selling lots of other kinds of records including direct-to-disc recordings, Heavy Vinyl, Half-Speeds, OJC‘s and various other pressings which we thought would appeal to those in search of higher quality sound.

In 2011, we officially stopped selling anything other than records we had cleaned, evaluated, and found to have superior sound.

We do a lot of MoFi bashing here at Better Records, and for good reason: most of their pressings are just plain awful. We are shocked and frankly dismayed to find that the modern day audiophile still flocks to this label with the expectation of a higher quality LP, seemingly unaware that although the vinyl may be quiet, the mastering — the sound of the music as opposed to the sound of the record’s surfaces — typically leaves much to be desired. 

Hence the commentary below, prompted by a letter from our good friend Roger, who owned the MoFi Night and Day and who had also purchased a Hot Stamper from us, which we are happy to say he found much more to his liking.

In my response, after a bit of piling on for the MoFi, I then turned my attention to three Nautilus records which I had previously held in high regard, but now find deserving of a critical beatdown. (We actually have a section for bad sounding records I once liked. Live and learn, right?) This one is entitled:

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The Alan Parsons Project – A MoFi Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons Available Now

MoFi Regular LP: F / UHQR: D 

Two — count ’em, two — hall of shame pressings and two more MoFi Half-Speed Mastered Audiophile LPs reviewed and found wanting.

The MoFi is a textbook example of their ridiculous affinity for boosting the top end, not to mention the extra kick they like to put in the kick drum, great for mid-fi (sometimes known around these parts as stone age audio systems) but a serious distraction on a high end stereo with good low end reproduction.

If you like the album –and that’s a big if, I myself have never been able to take it seriously — try the Simply Vinyl or the Classic LP.

Even the UHQR sucks. Don’t kid yourself. They’re still mastered by Stan Ricker, and he likes plenty of top end.

Like the old saying goes, if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing.

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Sgt. Pepper’s and Mistaken Audiophile Thinking (Hint: the UHQR Is Wrong)

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

This commentary was probably written between 2005 when we did our first shootout for the album and 2008, by which time it would have been a regular feature on the site. 

We charge hundreds of dollars for a Hot Stamper Sgt. Pepper, which is a lot to pay for a record. But consider this: the UHQR typically sells for a great deal more than the price we charge and doesn’t sound remotely as good. 

Of course the people that buy UHQRs would never find themselves in a position to recognize how much better one of our Hot Stampers sounds in a head to head shootout with their precious and oh-so-collectible UHQR.

They assume that they’ve already purchased the Ultimate Pressing and see no reason to try another.

I was guilty of the same mistaken audiophile thinking myself in 1982. I remember buying the UHQR of Sgt. Pepper and thinking how amazing it sounded and how lucky I was to have the world’s best version of Sgt. Pepper.

If I were to play that record now it most likely would be positively painful. All I would hear would be the famous MoFi 10K Boost on the top end (the one that MoFi lovers never seem to notice), and the flabby Half-Speed mastered bass (ditto).

Having heard really good copies of Sgt. Pepper, like the wonderful Hot Stampers we put on the site from time to time, now the MoFi UHQR sounds so phony to me that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it with a gun to my head.

UPDATE 2025

If you are still buying these remastered pressings, making the same mistakes that I was making before I knew better, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered LPs.

At the very least let us send you a Hot Stamper pressing — of any album you choose — that can show you what is lacking on your copy of the album.

And if for some reason you disagree with us that our record sounds better than yours, we will happily give you all your money back and wish you the very best.

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed mastered title ever made (with one exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please go to our Half-Speed mastering main page .

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A Trick Of The Tail – A MoFi Disaster to Beat Them All

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Genesis Available Now

This review is fairly old, probably from 2005-2010.

Not long ago I played the MoFi pressing of Trick of the Tail and could not believe how ridiculously compressed it was.  Rarely have I heard sound as squashed as that which is heard on this LP.

On top of that, the midrange is badly sucked out (as is the case with most Mobile Fidelity pressings) making the sound as dead, dull and distant as can be.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition. I have the CD and it’s fine. It sounds like a digital version of the British pressings we favor (the domestic pressings having been made from dubs of course).  The MoFi is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

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 may be in for quite a shock.

If you are still buying these audiophile pressings, take the advice of some of our customers and stop throwing your money away on Heavy Vinyl and Half-Speed mastered records.

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