lacks-life

The audiophile and other pressings listed here are as dead as the proverbial doornail.

The life of the music was sucked out of them by poor mastering, bad tapes, or the use of audibly inferior cutting equipment. In most cases it was some combination of the three.

Any properly-mastered, properly-pressed vintage LP — the kind we offer by the hundreds — will expose what con-jobs these so-called audiophile pressings are when played on a dynamic system at good loud levels.

Katy Lied Is a MoFi that Beggars Belief

Katy Lied is bad enough to have earned a place in our Mobile Fidelity hall of shame.

By the time I was avidly collecting Mobile Fidelity records in the late 70s, this title had already gone out of print, one of the first to do so. My guess is that even the guys running MoFi knew when they had a turkey on their hands and mercifully let this one go out of print and out of its misery.

Yes, the sound is so bad that even the brain trust at MoFi could hear it. 

Compressed and lifeless (almost as lifeless as the screen speakers so popular at the time), it’s hard to imagine any version sounding worse than this one. (Which is why it’s on this list.)

And yet I continued to play my copy, for enjoyment of course, oblivious — I must have been oblivious, right? — to the bad sound.

Why? That’s hard to say, but here’s a stab at it.

The vinyl was exceptionally quiet for one thing, and for another, as an audiophile I knew this MoFi pressing had been made with tender loving care, using a putatively superior process, Half-Speed mastering, from the original master tapes, and had been pressed in Japan on the quietest, flattest vinyl in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

My old story about One Man Dog gets to the heart of it.

I didn’t understand records very well and I sure didn’t understand the value of doing shootouts — or even how to do them — using multiple copies of the same album.

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Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review for Workingman’s Dead was written shortly after the release of the album in 2003.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say?

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A Night at the Opera Is a DCC Disaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Queen Available Now

Sonic Grade: F

The DCC pressing of Night at the Opera is a hopeless mess, one of the worst titles that Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman ever ruined.

Murky, opaque and compressed: yes, we can agree it has never been an especially good sounding record on anything but the most difficult to find UK pressings [and we know exactly which ones those are now, which only makes this record sound even worse in comparison], but does it deserve this kind of mastering disrespect?

Isn’t the idea to try and FIX what is wrong, rather than to make it worse?

At collector prices no less. Don’t waste your money like the folks on Discogs did.

It’s true that our Shootout Winning pressings sell for much more than the $811.63 someone paid, but keep in mind that we are selling you an amazing sounding record for that kind of dough, not a copy made for the mid-fi collector market, one that will spend very little of its time sitting on a turntable platter or having a needle tracing its grooves. (That would hurt the collector value, don’t you know.)

Instead it will no doubt get filed away on a shelf next to others of its kin, perhaps even in a special DCC section, organized in numerical order!

Is it the worst version of the album ever made?

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Fandango! Is Yet Another Hoffman/Gray Mediocrity

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of ZZ Top Available Now

Warner Brothers remastered Fandango in 2008, so we took some domestic pressings and put them up against their Heavy Vinyl LP.

The results were mixed; most of our original pressings were lackluster, many were noisy, and we just weren’t hearing anything with the sound we thought deserved to be called a Hot Stamper.

We shelved the project for another day.

In the interim we kept buying domestic pressings — originals and reissues — in the hopes that something good would come our way.

Fast forward to 2015. We drop the needle on a random pressing and finally — finally — hear a copy that rocks like we knew a ZZ Top album should. With that LP as a benchmark, we got a shootout up and running and the result is the record you see here.

How did the WB remaster fare once we had some truly Hot Stamper pressings to play against it?

Not well. It’s tonally correct, with a real top and bottom, something that a substantial number of copies cannot claim to be.

But the sound is stuck behind the speakers, veiled, and sorely lacking in energy and excitement.

The transparency is of course compromised on all these new reissues, and without transparency and resolution, much of the audience participation on the first side is lost.

I won’t say the new pressing is boring.

Let’s just say it’s a lot more boring than it should be. (more…)

So at 45 RPM – One Side Bad, Another Awful, What’s a Mother to Do?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Peter Gabriel Available Now

In 2016 a version of So came out using this currently popular vinyl format:

2 180g discs / 45 RPM / Deluxe, Numbered, Limited Edition /Half Speed mastered

As of this writing, there are 15 copies on Discogs, the cheapest of them starting at $139.77.

Sounds like it must be pretty good for that kind of money!

This So release was mastered by a fellow named Matt Colton, who has been doing this kind of work for a very long time, judging by the fact that he has 3,775 technical credits under his name on Discogs.

That did not stop this particular 2 LP set from being one of the worst sounding albums we have played in quite a while.

Let’s take a closer look at the specifics. We played sides one and four of the two-disc, four-sided album. That was more than enough to evaluate the sound quality.

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Let It Be on Heavy Vinyl – The Gong Rings Once More

Hot Stamper Pressings of Let It Be Available Now

At the end of a shootout for Let It Be back in June of 2014, we decided to see how the 2012 Digitally Remastered Heavy Vinyl pressing would hold up against the 12 (yes, twelve!) British copies we had just critically auditioned.

Having evaluated the two best copies on side two, we felt we knew exactly what separated the killer copies (White Hot) from the next tier down (Super Hot). Armed with just how good the recording could sound fresh in our minds, we threw on the new pressing. We worked on the VTA adjustment for the thicker record for a couple of minutes to get the sound balanced and as resolving as possible, and after a few waves of the Talisman we were soon hearing the grungy guitar intro of I’ve Got a Feeling.

My scribbled first notes: not bad!

Sure, there’s only a fraction of the space and three-dimensionality of the real British pressings, but the bass seemed to be there, the energy seemed decent enough, the tonality was good if a bit smooth and dark. All in all not a bad Beatles record.

Then we played One After 909 and the sound just fell off a cliff. It was so lifeless and compressed! The parts of the song that get loud on the regular pressings never get loud on the new one. The live-in-the-studio Beatles’ rock energy had somehow disappeared.

We couldn’t take more than a minute or two of the song. It was just too frustrating and irritating. What the hell did they do to make this record sound this way? We had no idea.

Didn’t matter. It was game over. The gong from The Gong Show had rung. The record had to go.

We had played twelve British copies, all with stampers that we knew to be good on side two. Two or three of those copies did not merit a Hot Stamper sonic grade. Nothing new there, happens all the time.

Yet even the worst copy we played of the twelve had more jump factor, more life and more dynamic energy than the new Heavy Vinyl pressing.

Which means that there’s a very good chance that any copy you pick up on British vinyl will be better sounding — maybe not a 100% chance but easily a 90+% chance. Which makes buying the new Heavy Vinyl LP, not to mention playing it, pointless unless…

Unless you are more of a record collector than an audiophile or music lover. And if you are one of those guys, you are definitely on the wrong blog, unless…

Unless you are here to repent and swear off the error of your ways.

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MoFi Sure Added Plenty of Sparkle to These Acoustic Guitars

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.

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The Most Serious Fault of the Typical Half-Speed Mastered LP?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Revolver Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This commentary must be fairly old because we haven’t bothered to play anything put out by Sundazed in longer than I can remember.

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.

And most Heavy Vinyl pressings coming down the pike these days are as guilty of this sin as their audiophile forerunners from the 70s. The average Sundazed record I throw on my turntable sounds like it’s playing in another room. What audiophile in his right mind could possibly find that quality appealing? (Apparently the guy who wrote this absurd list of records you should buy It has a number of inexcusably at best mediocre and mostly awful sounding Sundazed records.)

But Sundazed and other companies just like them keep turning out this crap. Somebody must be buying it.

So how does the famous MoFi pressing of Revolver sound? In a word, clean. Also not as crude as the average British import, and far better than any Japanese or domestic pressing we heard.

But it’s dead, man. It’s just so dead.

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Breezin’ – “Hot Stamper” MoFi Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Benson Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Having heard so many good sounding copies of this album, it is unlikely we would find much to like on the MoFi. But we can’t deny that we did, a long time ago, after cleaning and playing three MoFi copies, two of which were awful.

Sonic Grade: B-

Another MoFi reviewed, and surprisingly this one isn’t awful.

It has an excellent side two backed with a pretty good side one.

Side two has excellent bass — for a MoFi — and lots of energy — for a MoFi.

It’s slightly smooth, but overall it’s very musical. The best domestic copies are going to eat its lunch, but try to find one that sounds good. Most of them are awful. 

This MoFi copy, though lacking in many ways, is much better sounding than the other MoFi copies we played it against, which were muddy and compressed.

Side one of this copy has some of that sound. Side one lacks the transients we found on other copies and it’s a tad recessed and compressed. However, it does have relatively good bass definition and the strings are nicely textured.

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MoFi Proves Once Again It Has No Idea How to Make a Good Record

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Women Who Rock Available Now

We recently auditioned the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Learning to Crawl and wrote down our impressions as the record was playing that you see below.

We try to be very specific about the strengths and weaknesses of the records we play, which is why we reproduce our notes — in this case for audiophile records — whenever possible. (There are plenty of shootout notes for vintage pressings on the blog as well.)

The title at the top of our post-it sets the stage for what you are about to read: the specific faults of an “especially bad MoFi.”

Do they make any other kind? Well, sometimes, to be sure, but the good ones are few and far between.

It must be hard to make a record sound this bad, but if anyone can do it, Mobile Fidelity has proven that they are the men and women for the job. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

Side One

Dull drums at intro.
Bass compressed and wooly.
Vocal present and hard.
Everything else recessed.

Side Two

Very dry snare and guitar.
Flat, edgy and lifeless.
Not even clear.
Just shitty.
Lacks bass here too.

Consensus

NFG.

This one definitely belongs in the Mobile Fidelity hall of shame (along with 66 of their other titles). My CD sounds better.

To aid you in understanding just how lost the buyers of these audiophile records are these days — and who am I to talk? — we reproduce the five most recent reviews from Discogs as of 5/2026 below.

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