Labels With Shortcomings – Mobile Fidelity (UHQR)

“Ultra High Quality Records” or “Lipstick on a Pig”?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Audiophile Records Available Now

More on the Subject of Collecting Better Sounding Records

Today’s vinyl-loving audiophile seems to be making the same mistakes I was making more than forty years ago. Heavy Vinyl, the 45 RPM 2 LP pressing, the Half-Speed Limited Edition — aren’t these all just audiophile fads, each with a track record of underperformance that seems to worsen with each passing year? Would you really want to defend this piece of junk in 2023?

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In my formative years in audio, starting in the mid-70s, it would never have occurred to me to buy more than one copy of a record. I didn’t need to do a head-to-head comparison in order to find out which one sounded better. I approached the subject Platonically, not scientifically: the record that should sound better, would sound better.

Later on in the decade, a label by the name of Mobile Fidelity would come along claiming to actually make better sounding pressings than the ones the major labels put out, and cluelessly I bought into that nonsense too. (To be fair, sometimes they did — Waiting for Columbus and American Beauty come to mind if you don’t have properly-pressed, properly-mastered originals, but my god, Katy Lied, Year of the Cat and Sundown have to be three of the worst sounding records I’ve ever played in my life.)

And isn’t it every bit as true today as it was in the past that the audiophiles who buy these “special” pressings, like the ones I bought back in the 70s and 80s, rarely seem to notice that many of them don’t actually sound very good? (Some of the worst can be found here, the worst of the worst here.)

CofAEasy Answers and Quick Fixes

Turns out there are no easy answers. There are no quick fixes. In audio there’s only hard work and more hard work. That’s what gives the learning curve its curvature — the more you do it, the better you can do it.

And if doing all that work is also your idea of fun, you just might get really good at it.

If you actually enjoy playing five or ten or even fifteen copies of the same album to find the few that really sound good, and the one that sounds amazing — because hearing your favorite music the way it was meant to be heard is a positive thrill — then you just might end up with one helluva record collection, worlds better than one filled with audiophile pressings from any era, most especially the present.

Further Reading

The Alan Parsons Project – A MoFi Disaster

More Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons

Reviews and Commentaries for Albums Engineered by Alan Parsons

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 boosted top end, not to mention the extra kick they 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 SR, and he likes plenty of top end boost.

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

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.

Mobile Fidelity and the Limited Edition Pressing – The Answer Is No

More of the Music of The Beatles

Letters and Commentaries for Sgt. Peppers

More on the So-Called Ultra High Quality Record

Can you take the guesswork out of buying brand new high quality records?

The answer is no and it must forever remain no.

Many audiophiles are still operating under the misapprehension that Mobile Fidelity (or any other label you care to name), with their strict “quality control,” managed to eliminate pressing variations of the kind we discuss endlessly on the site. 

Such is simply not the case, and it’s child’s play to demonstrate how mistaken this way of thinking is, assuming you have these four things:

  1. Good cleaning fluids and a machine,
  2. Multiple copies of the same record,
  3. A reasonably revealing stereo, and
  4. Two working ears (I guess that’s actually five things, my bad).

With all five the reality of pressing variations — sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic — for ALL pressings is both obvious and incontrovertible. (A good example of a test we ran with some sealed Heavy Vinyl pressings can be found here.)

The fact that this is a controversial viewpoint in 2023 does not speak well of the audiophile community.

The raison d’être of the Limited Edition Audiophile Record is to take the guesswork out of buying the Best Sounding Pressing money can buy.

But it just doesn’t work that way. Not that I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our entire website is based on the proposition that nothing of the sort is true. If paying more money for an audiophile pressing guaranteed the buyer better sound, 80% of what we do around here would be a waste of time. Everybody knows what the audiophile pressings are, and there would be nothing for us to do but find them and throw them up on the website for you to buy. Why even bother to play them if they all sound so good?

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. Yay for me!

If I were to play that record now it 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 have on the site most of the 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.

Further Reading

To learn more about records that sound dramatically better than any Half-Speed ever made (with one rare exception, John Klemmer’s Touch), please consult our FAQs, found here:

Holst / The Planets – MoFi and UHQR Reviewed

Reviews and Commentaries for The Planets

More of the music of Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Sonic Grade: Regular MoFi LP: F / UHQR: D

Years ago we auditioned an excellent sounding Decca Purple Label British import LP, the same performance, the same recording that Mobile Fidelity remastered (#510), but, thankfully, it sounded A WHOLE LOT BETTER!

I just listened to both and a catalog of the faults of the MFSL pressing would be quite lengthy. I won’t waste your time listing them.

Although the recording is far from perfect, the Decca pressing shows it in its proper light. It finds the right balance between the multi-miked sound of the Super Disc List Mehta and a vintage recording from the Golden Age such as the famous Boult. The sound is very dynamic and the brass has tremendous weight.

The MoFi is thin and bright.

Their UHQR is somewhat better, not quite as thin and phony up top, but not really very good either.

Avoid them both.

Our favorite performance of The Planets can be found here.

Many of Solti’s recordings from the Seventies are not to our liking, for reasons we lay out here.

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Classic Records Had an Epiphany in 2007 – UHQRs Actually DO Sound Good!

Don’t believe your ears! Listen to Mike Hobson.

This commentary is from 2007 and admittedly a bit long in the tooth for the brave new world of Heavy Vinyl we currently find ourselves in. Classic Records has been gone for quite a while and when that happened we said good riddance to their bad records.

Mike Hobson finally figured out why his pressings often don’t sound good and/or are noisy. We’ll let him explain it. If you want the whole story (which goes on for days) you can find it on the Classic Records web site. While you’re there, remember the sound.

One day, while out for a run, I had an epiphany and rushed home to dig out a JVC pressing from the 1980’s pressed for Herb Belkin’s Mobile Fidelity. The Mobile Fidelity UHQR pressings were always revered as sounding better than the standard weight pressings from JVC [citation needed, big time] – but why I thought? To find out, I cut a UHQR pressing in half and guess what I found? First, it weighed 195 grams and IT WAS A FLAT PROFILE! I cut a 120g JVC pressing in half and found that it had the conventional profile that, with small variations, seems to be a record industry standard and is convex in it’s [sic] profile – NOT FLAT.

So, that is why the UHQR JVC pressings sounded better than their standard profile pressings and further confirmation of why our Flat Profile pressings sound better than 180g conversional pressings! [italics added]

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This is a classic (no pun intended) case of Begging the Question, asserting the very thing that Mr. Hobson is trying to prove.

There was no need to saw up a record. Mofi actually explained in the booklet for every UHQR how its shape differed from a conventional disc.

Here is one of the images they used in the technical specs booklet that came with most UHQRs. Yes, it’s flat. (The later ones didn’t have the booklet because the whole project was such a disaster that they didn’t want to spend the money to print them for records they were selling below their cost. When I first got in the audiophile record biz in the late ’80s I was buying boxfuls of sealed UHQRs for $9 each.)

Let’s Get Real

UHQRs were junk then and they are junk now. They are plainly and simply bad sounding records. The UHQR pressings may have been revered in their day, may even be revered now, but they are truly awful sounding records, Tea for the Tillerman probably being the worst of them.

Do UHQRs sound better than the standard weight pressings MoFi was pressing at the time? Some do and some don’t, but what difference does that make? Bad sound is bad sound. Whether one bad record is slightly better than another bad record is not particularly useful information. (more…)

Back to the Stone Age with The Pines of Rome on Mobile Fidelity

Click Here to See Our Favorite Pines of Rome

More Reviews and Commentaries for The Pines of Rome

More Records Perfectly Suited for the Stone Age Stereos of the ’70s

An Audiophile Hall of Shame pressing and another MoFi LP reviewed and found wanting.

MoFi’s version of this recording (#1-507) is one of the worst sounding classical records they ever made, and that’s saying something, because most of their classical catalog is awful. Thin, bright, with sloppy bass and completely unnatural string tone — the MoFi makes the typical Classic Record sound good! And that’s REALLY saying something.

The UHQR is somewhat better, especially in the lower octaves, but it’s maybe a D+ or C-, not a Better Record by any means.

How dull and opaque does a stereo have to be to make this record listenable?

The answer is VERY dull and VERY opaque.

Stone Age Audio Systems are the only ones that can play junk like this and get away with it.          (more…)

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

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers

Letters and Commentaries for Sgt. Peppers

More on the UHQR

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 more than the price we charge and doesn’t sound 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 need 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 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.

(more…)

Cat Stevens / Tea For The Tillerman – MoFi Reviewed (UHQR too)

More of the Music of Cat Stevens

More Reviews and Commentaries for Tea for the Tillerman

Reviews and Commentaries for UHQRs

Sonic Grade: MoFi LP: D / Sonic Grade: MoFi UHQR: F 

Two Audiophile Hall of Shame pressings and two more MoFi LPs reviewed and found to be perfectly suited to the Stone Age Stereos of the Past.

Tea for the Tillerman is, I hope it goes without saying, one of the greatest folk rock records of all time, music that belongs in any collection.

I’ve been playing this album for more than 30 years [now more than 50] and I can honestly say I’ve never once tired of hearing it.

I do get tired of hearing bad copies. I become absolutely incensed when I play the Mobile Fidelity version of this album, because what they did to this record is a travesty. If you want to know what the guitars on this album are NOT supposed to sound like, play the MOFI.

And if you want to hear an even worse version, play the UHQR.

New to the Blog? Start Here

More on the Subject of Half-Speed Mastering

Records are getting awfully expensive these days, and it’s not just our Hot Stampers that seem priced for perfection.

If you are still buying these modern 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 wrong with 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.

Jack Sheldon / Unreleased UHQR Test Pressing – Reviewed in 2007

This is a PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW UHQR JVC Test Record. The record is virtually unplayed! The RAREST of the RARE! I’m SHOCKED at how good this record sounds. It has AMAZING live jazz sound. 

Jack Sheldon – Playin’ It Straight

Here’s Jack on trumpet with his Late-Show All-Stars: Alan Broadbent, piano; Pete Christlieb, tenor & baritone saxes & flute; Joel Di Bartolo, bass: Mundell Lowe, guitar; Tommy Newsom, alto sax & flute; and Ed Shaughnessy, drums. 

For those of you who do not know the complete story, basically the UHQR — the Ultra High Quality Record — was invented by JVC as a test to see how good a cost-no-object vinyl pressing could sound. It was thicker, had a longer pressing cycle, and other technological improvements, all with the goal of making the ultimate LP.

Mobile Fidelity produced limited editions of eight titles on UHQR, and both Reference and Telarc produced one each.

Apparently tests were done by others as well, because here we have some M&K recordings on UHQR. I believe they are not known to exist — until now. I bought them from M&K myself a few years back, along with some Flamenco Fevers and a box full of unplayed For Dukes. That was a good day for Better Records!

TRACK LISTING

Playin’ It Straight 
Steeplechase
That Old Feeling
Lover
Sweet Georgia Brown
I Hadn’t Anyone Til You
On Green Dolphin Street
Here’s That Rainy Day 

The secret is our exclusive RealTime Recording Process. Conceived and carried out by our own perfectionist audiophile/engineers, it keeps us working at the leading edge of recording technology. Every link in the chain—from microphones through recorders and/or disc-cutting lathe to custom-plating and pressing—is continuously monitored and upgraded to significantly exceed even the highest previous standards.

Our AKG microphones are first fitted with AKG’s latest capsules, in Austria, then further modified by RealTime engineers. Microphone output feeds RealTime’s own unique, passive mixer. No limiters, compressors, pan pots or other signal-degrading devices are used and the entire length of our signal path is 100% free of transformers.

Even our Neumann DC-coupled SAL/SX-74 600 watt/channel disc-cutting lathe is highly modified. And it is driven by a newly-developed Technics direct-drive cutting lathe motor. Disc masters are immediately flown overseas for custom-plating and careful pressing on the finest virgin vinyl available.

RealTime Records: the sound of unrivaled realism — so closely mirroring the original performance that any difference is virtually impossible to distinguish. Sample the sound of unrivaled realism on RealTime Records.