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 cloth-eared audiophiles at MoFi knew when they had a turkey on their hands and mercilessly put this one 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.