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Half-Speeds

That’s an easy one. Over the 37 years we’ve been in the audiophile record business, we’ve played Half-Speed mastered LPs by the hundreds. As our ability to reproduce the sound of records improved (better equipment, table setup, tweaks, room treatments, electricity and the like), the gap between the better non-half-speed mastered pressings and even the best of the half-speeds grew and grew.

The half-speeds fell further and further behind, with so few exceptions to the rule that they could easily be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are currently four half-speed mastered titles that we carry as Hot Stampers. To put that in perspective, of the roughly two thousand Hot Stamper titles we offer, those four are the only ones to make the cut.

The most serious fault of the typical Half-Speed mastered LP is not incorrect tonality or poor bass definition, although you will have a hard time finding one that doesn’t suffer from both. It’s dead as a doornail sound, plain and simple. We’ve been playing half-speed mastered records since I bought my first Mobile Fidelity in the late-70s. That works out to forty years of experience with the sonic characteristics of this mastering approach, an approach we have found to have consistent shortcomings.

These shortcomings have somehow eluded the devotees of these records, no doubt the way they eluded me until I had improved my playback to the point where I could hear just how wrong they were.

I made a list of the worst sounding ones that I actually used to like, numbering more than 30, and you can read all about them here.

Their sonic shortcomings no longer elude us, and we have taken the time to lay out their faults, chapter and verse, in the commentaries you see below.

The current record holder for most compressed Mobile Fidelity pressing of all time?

This shockingly bad sounding release, a record I admit to owning and liking back in the 80s. I had a lot of very expensive equipment back then, but it sure wasn’t helping me recognize the sonic problems of this ridiculous pressing and scores of others.

How many audiophiles are where I used to be? Based on what I read on audiophile forums, and the kinds of audiophile pressings I see discussed on youtube videos, it seems that most of them are.

There is an obvious way to steel oneself against the collectible allure of the audiophile pressing, but it is neither easy nor cheap.

It does work though. Boy, does it ever.

We here present a set of ideas about remastering that Mobile Fidelity could have used to guide them as they went about cutting their version of Hall and Oates’ masterpiece, Abandoned Luncheonette.

This is the approach they could have taken when it came time to produce an audiophile pressing of Abandoned Luncheonette, an album originally released in 1973.

One of our customers wrote to us years ago with news that the Hot Stamper pressing of Night and Day we sent him killed his MoFi:

The hot stamper was far more dynamic, warm, punchy, and detailed than the MoFi. The piano had a lot more weight and stood apart in the mix. In fact, I could hear all the instruments stand out in the mix a lot more with the HS version. I was surprised at how the music came alive with the HS pressing instead of the blah MFSL.

A blah Mobile Fidelity record? Say it isn’t so!

If this mastering technology is superior, as its followers believe it is, why don’t half-speed mastered records sound better than real-time mastered records, like the ones we sell?

The MoFi pressing of The Doors’ first album is yet another obvious example of MoFi’s predilection for a sucked-out midrange.

The midrange suckout effect is easily reproducible in your very own listening room. Pull your speakers farther out into the room than they should be, and also farther apart than they should be, and you can get that MoFi sound on every record you play. I’ve been hearing it in the various audiophile systems I’ve auditioned for decades.

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