Robert Brook has a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Below is a link to a review Robert Brook wrote recently for the MoFi One-Step pressing of one of our favorite albums of all time, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, originally released in 1971.
Blue Sounds Funny Now
Based on everything I am reading these days from Robert Brook, he has a good stereo, two working ears, and knows plenty about records and what they are supposed to sound like.
This was not always the case as he himself would tell you. His stereo used to be much better at hiding the faults of a record like the MoFi One-Step of Blue than the stereo he has now. He got rid of most of his audiophile electronics, got a better phono stage, cartridge and arm, improved the quality of his electricity, found some sophisticated vibration controlling platforms for his vintage gear and did lots of other things to make his playback more accurate and — we cannot stress this too strongly — more fun, more exciting and more involving.
When your stereo is doing a better job of reproducing what’s in the grooves of your records, the first thing you notice when playing a Mobile Fidelity or other Heavy Vinyl pressing is that the sound is funny and wrong. (Please excuse the technical jargon; those of you who have been audiophiles as long as we have will understand what I mean, the rest of you can just play along. All of this will make sense eventually.)
When you use colored-sounding audiophile equipment — but I repeat myself — then your colored-sounding audiophile records don’t sound nearly as colored as they would under other conditions.
For example, other conditions obtain if you have — again, sorry about the jargon — revealing, accurate, tonally correct, natural-sounding equipment, free from the colorations — euphonic and otherwise — that allow one piece of audiophile equipment to sound so different from another.
Robert, through dedication, hard work, perseverance, and, most importantly, a real love of music, has succeeded where so many have failed, and now he has a system that mercilessly reveals the flaws of these modern records in much the way that our system does. He takes no prisoners and neither do we.
It took us a very, very long time to build such a system. I got involved with high-end audio in 1975. A mere 32 years later I had a stereo that found faults with a Heavy Vinyl pressing that practically everybody in the audiophile community was raving about. With each passing year it has become more and more clear that we were right about that record and everybody else was wrong.
These other folks couldn’t hear the colorations and limitations in the sound of Blue because the colorations and limitations in their systems either drowned them out or made them too difficult to recognize.
As you may know, from that point on we never took the modern remastered records made by any audiophile label or mastered by any audiophile-approved mastering engineer at face value. We put them to the test and they failed almost every time. (We’re so glad to know that the only title we really like was not mastered or pressed for audiophiles. Whew! Still batting 1.000.)
Robert managed to compress those 32 years into a much more workable number by following our lead and taking our advice. The British writer Aubrey Menen states the idea succinctly in this quote:
The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
If your audiophile records don’t sound like something is wrong with them, or something is missing, then it’s time to get to work and make some changes. Keep at it until the problems with these records become more clear.
Make no mistake, these records are doing some things well and some things not so well, and a proper stereo should be able to help you sort out which are which.
Most audiophile systems I have heard are not able to do this — in fact they act as an impediment to efforts of this kind. I assume it is one of the main reasons their owners have fallen for the modern remastered LP. (There are plenty of others too numerous to mention here. You can find some of them under the heading of mistaken thinking.)
Robert writes:
Not every listener will hear what’s missing from this One-Step. With most modern audiophile systems struggling to reproduce the subtle transients that make a record like Blue so compelling, I’d guess that most will not. I could even see how a lot of audiophiles would prefer this One-Step to even the best vintage copies. After all, it’s hard to find a vintage copy of Blue that plays quietly AND sounds good, and this MoFi checks both those boxes.
But make no mistake, something is missing on this MoFi, and it’s not something that can be brought back by playing it on a “better” or more expensive system. Some of the precious life of Blue has been lost in this One-Step, and it simply cannot be resuscitated. The only way to bring that life back is to find a great vintage copy and build a stereo that can play it back well.