Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Linda Ronstadt Available Now
Here’s what we learned when doing a shootout years ago: many copies sounded like they were Half-Speed mastered.
For those of you who don’t know what that means, or sounds like, the blog is full of commentaries about the sonic shortcomings of this mastering technique.
In this case, these Half-Speed sounding ones had a little something phony added to the top of Linda’s voice; they had a little bit of suckout right in the middle of the midrange, the middle of her voice; and they had an overall diffuse, vague quality, with sound that lacked the solidity we heard on the best of the non-audiophile pressings we played.
These hi-fi-ish qualities that we heard reminded us of the kind of sound we decry at every turn. We’ve played literally hundreds and hundreds of MoFi’s and other Half-Speed mastered records over the course of the last twenty thirty-plus years, and one thing we know well is that sound.
But stop and think about it for a moment.
What if you only had one copy of the album — why would someone have more than one anyway? — and it had that Half-Speed sound?
You’d simply assume the recording had those qualities, assuming you recognized them in the first place.
(Let’s face it, most audiophiles can’t, or all these companies that use this approach to mastering would have gone out of business and stayed out of business, and their out of print records would sell for peanuts, not the collector prices they bring on ebay and discogs. More on that subject here.)