Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Cat Stevens Available Now
Our good customer Roger wrote us a letter years ago about his Tea for the Tillerman on Mobile Fidelity, in which he remarked, “Sometimes I wish I kept my old crappy stereo to see if I could now tell what it was that made these audiophile pressings so attractive then.”
It got me to thinking. Yes, that would be fun, and better yet, it could be done. There are actually plenty of those old school audio systems of the 60s and 70s still around. Just look at what many of the forum posters — god bless ’em — are running. They’ve got some awesome ’70s Japanese turntables, some Monster Cable and some vintage tube gear and speakers designed in the ’50s.
With this stuff you could virtually travel back in time, in effect erasing all the audio progress made possible by the new technologies adopted by some of us over the last 30 years or so.
Then you could hear your Mobile Fidelity Tea for the Tillerman sound the way it used to when you could actually stand to be in the same room with it.
My question to Roger was “What on earth were we hearing that made us want to play these awful half-speed mastered records? What was our stereo doing that made these awful records sound good to us at the time?”
In Search of a Bad Stereo
I know how you can find out. You go to someone’s house who has a large collection of audiophile pressings and have him play you some of them. Chances are that his stereo will do pretty much what your old stereo and my old stereo used to do — be so wrong that really wrong records actually start to sound right! It seems crazy but it just might be true.
Think about it. If your stereo has no real top end extension, then a boosted top end like the kind found on practically every record MoFi ever made is a positive boon.
Down low, if you don’t have good bass reproduction, the bad bass that pretty much all half-speeds evince won’t bother you, it’ll sound bad the way the bass on all your records sounds: bad. And the boosted bass you get on so many MoFi pressings works to your benefit too.
How about those sparkling guitars? For systems that are incredibly opaque and low-resolution, the kind we all used to have, the kind that sound like we added three or four grilles to the front of the speaker, the MoFi guitars actually might start to cut through the veils and may sound — gulp! — right.