More of the Music of The Beatles
More Reviews and Commentaries for Please Please Me
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.