Hot Stamper Pressing of the Music of Ry Cooder Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This review is from many years ago, the last time we had a copy of the album in stock to play. Hard to imagine I would not still agree with it though.
As you probably know, the MoFi of Jazz goes for big bucks nowadays — $500 and up. Is it worth it?
You’ve got to be kidding. It’s a nice record as far as it goes, but it suffers from the same shortcomings as just about every Mobile Fidelity pressing we bother to play these days (with some obvious exceptions of course).
We have a test pressing, and knowing that the MoFi is the standard against which many audiophiles prefer to judge our Hot Stampers, we listened to it first before going about our comparison test.
Our MoFi copy is actually tonally correct, which was a bit of a surprise. (Yours of course could very well be otherwise.)
Right away we could hear exactly what people like about it, the same thing that has always impressed audiophiles about half-speed mastered records: their often outstanding transparency.
Jazz on MoFi has zero-distortion, utterly clear, spacious, see-through sound.
But listen past that and what do you hear?
Don’t those guitars seem to have that MoFi Tea-for-the-Tillerman “sparkly” quality you hate: all pluck and no body, all detail and no solidity?
Nothing has any weight.
Nothing sounds natural.
Nothing sounds real.
It’s pretty, maybe, but it sure ain’t right.
It’s the kind of sound that shouts out to the world “Hey, look at me, I’m an audiophile record! See how I sound? So clear! So clean!”
Which isn’t bad for about two minutes, and then it’s positively insufferable.
