More Frank Sinatra
More Count Basie
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.
It’s ideal for most audiophiles.
Ask yourself three questions:
Do you want the expense and hassle of finding a nice original stereo copy?
Do you want to invest in proper record cleaning equipment to restore the glorious sound of the original’s 50-plus year old vinyl?
Do you want to spend the time (decades) and money (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.
It’s quiet, it’s tonally correct, and on the mediocre equipment you will use to play it back with, it does not seem to be especially veiled, opaque or compressed.
It is indeed all of these things, and many more, but 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 they come. 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.)
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 a very low bar for as long as I can remember, and the fact that they are still around is positive proof that their customers like it just fine that way.
FURTHER READING
This record has middling sound, and naturally we have a section for records of that quality.
Pressings with Excellent Sound Quality
Pressings with Middling Sound Quality