Letters to the Editor: Reframing?

I hope you print this letter, though it may not reflect favorably on TAS.

Multiple articles in the October issue on the “MoFi Mess/Controversy” tried to reframe the discovery of a digital file in the MoFi LP-making process as either no big deal (Valin: “[audiophiles should] show some charity”) or even a blessing in disguise (Harley: “there’s an argument that an LP can sound better than the digital file from which it was created”). This latter offers two explanations of how this can be which do not bear scrutiny. The first is maybe when the digital signal is converted to mechanical motion at the lathe cutting head, it is somehow better than if a DAC sent the result directly to a preamplifier. Huh? The second is that MoFi’s DAC that did the job (as long ago as 2007) is likely better than my present (in 2022) or future DAC. Both explanations disregard the enormous improvement in DAC technology (jitter and timing control) in the last two decades and that many DACs in 2022 are superior to what MoFi used, which by the way, is not revealed.

It’s time to just admit the “analog-only” crowd got fooled into recognizing that D-A conversion can sound so good, they cannot tell it was ever there.

Noah Riess

JV replies: Though it may not reflect favorably on you, you apparently didn’t read my editorial very carefully. I’m on record (and the TAS SuperLP List, which I compile and write, proves it) recommending many LPs that were not only mastered but recorded digitally. As I said in my editorial, “AAA provenance” doesn’t matter to me the way it does to certain analog traditionalists. If a record sounds good, it sounds good.

I also need to point some things out here to those of you who seem to be gloating over the digital duplication step taken in the creation of certain MoFi LPs (and the “deafness” and self-delusion of those analog hounds who have liked them). What everyone in this “let-them-eat-digital” crowd seems to be ignoring is: a) the digital copy MoFi used was made from an analog original (and not just any old analog tape but the actual mastertape, complete with splices, stored in the studio vaults); b) though that tape was painstakingly copied to DSD (with continual azimuth adjustments between splices), the sometimes superior sound of these MoFi One-Steps isn’t simply the result of the superior transparency of digital duplication; it is also the result of the superior resolution of analog recording (you can’t tell me that digitizing an analog source is adding detail that wasn’t recorded on the tape itself—it is simply, or not so simply, preserving detail that was already there); c) digital duplication of analog masters notwithstanding, MoFi is mastering its tapes in the analog realm, using Tim de Paravicini’s bespoke EQ electronics, and cutting them to vinyl on a lathe powered by de Paravicini tube amplifiers. In other words, there is still an awful lot of analog—and “old-fashioned” glass analog, at that—in MoFi’s “digital” discs. On top of this, LPs, regardless of their provenance, do not sound like CDs, SACDs, or hi-res digital downloads or streams of the same material. They have their own sound, which many of us continue to prefer for its superior lifelikeness. (BTW, Jim Davis is on record in our interview saying that, since 2014, MoFi has used Merging Technologies’ Horus A/D system for its hi-res DSD copies; before that, it used a Meitner A/D.)

RH replies: In my explanation of why an LP cut from a digital file may sound better than the file itself I was quoting famed mastering engineer, Sheffield Lab co-founder, and father of the modern direct-to-disc record, Doug Sax. I don’t know anyone who knows more about LPs than Sax and was simply sharing his viewpoint.