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From the Editor: The Mofi Mess

From the Editor

A fresh scandal has cropped up in the contentious little world of high-end audio—and it’s cropped up in a place you wouldn’t expect. Turns out that Mobile Fidelity, the world-famous company that has long claimed to source its celebrated LP reissues from verified “original masters,” has actually been using digital copies of those original mastertapes rather than the tapes themselves (or first-gen copies) to master its One-Step LPs. Where record lovers thought they were buying all-analog vinyl (“AAA,” to use the old SPARS code), they were actually being sold digitally duplicated and mastered recordings (“ADA”)—and at premium prices. To make matters worse, it appears the digital wool wasn’t just pulled over the eyes of One-Step buyers; MoFi has been doing this very same thing (or something like it) on many of its “Original Master” releases for better than a decade.

I don’t know—and won’t know until MoFi comes out with the complete source list it has promised—exactly which of its reissues were digitally copied and mastered prior to the One-Steps, but I do know, per our Michael Fremer, that anything sourced from Sony/Columbia (e.g., Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Santana, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk—to name a few) was likely digitally processed, since Sony was unwilling to send its original mastertapes to MoFi’s Sebastopol, CA, facility for production.

This is an embarrassing mess, and MoFi needs to fix it. 

Of course, calling its products “Original Master Recordings” isn’t a fib. The company was working from verified original analog mastertapes (or at least the closest things its engineers could find to the original masters); it was just copying them (or many of them) to hi-res digital files—and didn’t say so. Until the company recently changed its wording online and in its archives, I couldn’t find anything in MoFi’s literature, dating back to before the turn of the millennium, that suggests a “digital step” in the mastering process. Indeed, Mobile Fidelity’s publicity has, I think, deliberately left the impression that everything is accomplished in the analog domain. Any way you look at it, this was not full disclosure. 

However, there is an important proviso to the MoFi story—at least there is for listeners like me. To wit, I have liked and continue to like many recordings pressed to vinyl that were not just mastered but also recorded digitally. (Take Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, or Diana Krall’s Turn Up the Quiet, or Hans Theessink’s Jedermann Remixed—The Soundtrack, among numerous examples.) Though I’ve tended to prefer all-analog recordings, I’ve never been an “AAA” purist. If a record sounds great—and a whole bunch of audiophile LPs that were recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally do—I couldn’t care less about its provenance. There is a magic about vinyl playback that can bring even the most primitive digital (or analog) recording quite a bit closer to the sound and pleasure of the real thing.

So…the only bone I have to pick with MoFi isn’t about the way it masters its LPs. It’s about the less than forthright way it has advertised and promoted them. If MoFi is as convinced of the sonic superiority of digital duplication and mastering as Jim Davis claims it is (once again, see pp. 20 and 22), why conceal the fact? 

My bottom line is this: After MoFi spent decades keeping the LP alive and kicking—releasing many, many sonic triumphs over that span (including several of the One-Steps)—it would be worse than ungrateful of audiophiles not to show some charity here. If the company continues to come clean about what it’s done (and on July 27, 2022, Davis took a big first step in that direction [see p. 18], publicly apologizing for MoFi’s “vagueness” about its mastering chain, pledging future transparency about the provenance of its products, and promising to “backfill source information on previous releases,” which it has already started to do), I, for one, am willing to let the matter drop. As I said, when recordings sound as good as many MoFi LPs, it makes little difference how they were mastered. 

Tags: DIGITAL LP MOFI MUSIC

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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