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After the big fire I bet digital copies are the best thing left in many cases.
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Mobile Fidelity Analog Vinyl Controversy
- Thread starter Azazello13
- Start date
DavidMcRoy
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Pardon me if this has already been addressed, but before this revelation did any analog purist ever bitch about any Mobile Fidelity releases having any audible digital artifacts? Does any of this even matter?
The other way round. They were gushing how incredible those records are WITHOUT any digital blasphemy.
charleski
Major Contributor
It's interesting to see that these revelations are taking their time in percolating through to the marketplace. The 'One-Step' release of Abraxas that many talk about on YouTube is still being listed for insane prices on Discogs. There are a couple of stupid-price listings for it on eBay, but I noticed at least one which slashed the price considerably. No-one's scooped up this 'bargain' yet, but I bet most of the 11 watchers are other speculators sitting on stashes of expensive MFSL discs who are probably desperate to offload them.
mhardy6647
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ABsolutely!Well…………I admit I don’t own/have any children of my own, nor do I own any vinyl or means of vinyl playback so I guess I’m ok with it?, nor do I care for a mofi t shirt but everyone else online is shitting on them and I felt kinda left out.
Thats how this online thingy works ain’t it?
And I love piling on! (see, e.g., the Carver 275 thread here a while back)
I have to say, though (with uncharacteristic seriousness), that this particular imbroglio doen't stir up much dudgeon on my part.
Creating a working master with DSD seems very pragmatic -- and I have no sympathy for the collectors/speculators.
Vintage Altec, JBL, RCA (etc.) theater loudspeakers and drivers (e.g.) are collectible because they were statement products, pinnacles of engineering and design of their era, and historically significant (EDIT: and darned satisfying to listen to!). Making something a collector's item by pressing 1k of them and stoking the market by touting the exclusivity is cheating.
There! I managed to work up a bit of dudgeon!
1) There will always be crackles if you push the volume -I listen loud- & 2) I only copy non reissued discs which are extremely scarce in good condition -if you find any-, sometimes thousand of $.
The effect of wood glue is much lower than that of the best cleaning machines such as Clearaudio (for example, I know the price is not for many).
Their website did claim that the process was purely analog, with no analog to digital conversion.
They just updated the information on their website in the aftermath of this debacle...
From the Washington Post article:
But last week, the company began updating the sourcing information on its website
I'm not talking about last week - I'm talking about for years. They've said for years they cut their vinyl masters from a tape deck, and go thru multiple contortions to reduce vinyl generational loss. That's always been true and still is.
*Which* process, and where on their site? Their site has, for as long as I can remember, only ever made claims about their vinyl-cutting process.
Their site has never claimed AAA end-to-end from master tape to vinyl mastering/cutting - people assumed that because they have heavily-advertised a purely analog vinyl mastering and cutting process, which is not the same thing as claiming full AAA end-to-end.
The distinction is lost on a lot of people, because a lot of people who fetishize this kind of thing tend to have an imperfect understanding of what exactly they're fetishizing and why anyway.
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Not if you carefully declick after digital transfer.
The effect was entirely good enough for my purposes., i.e., the results required very little declicking.
I certainly have no need for a Clearaudio machine. I can count the number of vinyl to LP transfers I've had to do, across a decade, on one hand. And these records got played exactly once (twice, if I screwed up the first time)
Robin L
Master Contributor
Interesting to note Mikey recently leaving Stereophile/Analog Planet for the Absolute Sound just in time for MoFi to draw the attention of WaPo.
Interesting timing.
Interesting timing.
This is fascinating, because if all this does is harm speculators it's probably a net good.
It's a weird thing. The exact same vinyl is worth less today than it was yesterday, even though it sounds exactly the same as it did yesterday, and no additional copies are in circulation. The difference is entirely in people's heads. The value apparently comes from how people think it sounds, not how it actually sounds
Ken1951
Addicted to Fun and Learning
This, in a nutshell, defines the entire audiowoo universe. Perfection!The value apparently comes from how people think it sounds, not how it actually sounds
I'm not gonna go through the whole archive of changes, but here is one:
Old version:
First and foremost, we only utilize first generation original master recordings as source material for our releases. We then play back master tapes at half speed enabling the GAIN 2 Ultra Analog™ system to fully extract the master's sonic information. Our lacquers are then plated in a...
New version:
First and foremost, we only utilize first generation original master recordings as source material for our releases. Our lacquers are then plated in a...
This is how they described the process. Except they didn't do that, they copied the master tapes to DSD files and fed those into their 'Ultra Analog' (lol) system.
We then play back master tapes at half speed enabling the GAIN 2 Ultra Analog™ system to fully extract the master's sonic information.
Yep, they removed the vaguest and most audio-woo sentence in their ad copy, and their "GAIN 2 Ultra Analog" system has always been entirely unspecified and probably largely pointless. It has also always been clearly entirely too vague to be used as a claim that full-chain AAA was happening.
I imagine they play the master tapes back at half-speed and flat-capture them to DSD256 which, as the statement correctly points out, absolutely has enough headroom to perfectly capture everything on the master and then some, and that this is part of their "Gain 2 Ultra Analog" system. That wouldn't make the sentence they removed false.
It just means people read "Gain 2 Ultra Analog" (a stupid and meaningless phrase, what the hell could "ultra analog" even mean) and went "OH I GUESS THAT MEANS AAA", and were wrong.
You can accuse MoFi of using vague and handwavy descriptions of their "proprietary" process (which has been a valid accusation levelled at them for decades) and that's totally fair - you can't accuse them of claiming in their site copy that their releases were "pure AAA" (another term that doesn't mean much by the way, and IMO about as useful as "ultra analog") - because they didn't.
It's a failure on both sides - a long-standing lack of clarity on MoFi's part, and a singularly incurious gullibility on the part of their vinyl customers, who see an ad-copy oxymoron like "Ultra Analog" and make assumptions about what that means, and (notably) didn't particularly care what it meant as long as the word "analog" was in it, and as long as they liked the sound of the releases and preferred them to others, which they did.
Additionally, people are just fundamentally wrong for thinking the thing in contention actually matters at all - as evidenced, it only matters in people's heads, not on the record or in the sound, and MoFi's engineers are right to not see any problem with using the DSD step where they do - because there isn't one! It's an intelligent decision that will result in a perfect copy of the original tape that doesn't risk harm to the original tape.
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If I tell you that I planted these seeds by hand in earth treated with 0 chemicals, then gave them a well rounded diet of natural compost, picked them by hand at exactly the right time and delivered them to the store myself, would it be the buyers fault for not knowing that I also gave them the strongest chemicals from day one and froze them for 6 months after picking them?
Look I find it hilarious that the same audiofools who convinced themselves that they could hear that these records were AAA, now have to convince themselves that they can hear the digital conversion in the exact same records, but describing the process and harping on about which brand and model of analog gear you use, and simply leaving out all the digital steps, that's not the buyers fault for not knowing you left those out.
Vladimir Filevski
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Yes, we can!
Because from their old add:
we can clearly see two discs (next to red arrow) which represent a symbol of ANALOG reel-to-reel deck – recognizable by everyone and everywhere in the world!
You can't deny that!
And after that ANALOG reel-to-reel deck (strengthened with the words "original master recording") there are no mention of any digital step in the whole chain of the "Ultradisc One-Step"!
So, please stop with your laughable attempts to defend this outrageous lie!
MarkS
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Sure, and this is quite common. Think "hand made" vs "machine made", or "made in Switzerland" vs "made in China". Even if the products are completely indinguishable by the end customer, those kinds of provenances matter and can strongly effect the value.
For a company that emphasizes their workflow, did they ever talk about DSD/Digital in the middle? If not, then that is clearly wrong. And they knew it to boot. I mean who doesn't know in their field that LP lovers like their analog workflow?
I am sure the first time they thought to digitize the content they had to pause and think about this.
1. They put "Original Master Recording" on their SACDs, and have for years. Does it mean "pure-AAA" there? No, of course not. That's never been what they're talking about. It's never meant "pure-AAA". Some consumers in the vinyl world assumed it did, because they weren't really paying attention to MoFi's decades-long usage and explanation of the term.
2. "Original Master Recording" means what it says - they start from the original master. They do take the original master recording and they do use it in their presumably-bespoke vinyl cutting process and in their SACD mastering process and they do always label their stuff when they take the original master recording, and that's what their usage of the term means - again none of this has changed for years.
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They've always favored Trademarked Terms(TM) without any real specifics to describe their processes, more than actual facts, and have since the beginning. It's dumb, which is why it's always been smarter to ignore that and actually listen to the masterings, or simply ignore MoFi.
Both of which are smarter than making demonstrably silly assumptions about nonsense and then getting upset when you find out the record you bought and thought was great is still great, but you were wrong about why.
Nobody's records sound worse today than they did yesterday. MoFI's been taking flat DSD transfers of master tapes for at least a decade. If you as consumer "got cheated", what did you get cheated out of, exactly?
I would argue that "cutting vinyl directly from the master tapes with no digital steps" as a marketing blurb is a much newer phenomenon than MoFi, or any of MoFi's advertising or Trademarked Processes(TM). Hell, the last time they updated their ad copy was before the most recent vinyl resurgence. And they've always focused their processes on cutting lacquers, pressing vinyl with minimal generational loss, etc - the vinyl manufacturing process itself. I strongly suspect the market has changed around them, and now demands things that 10 years ago virtually no one cared about.
Undoubtedly, and the engineers that started doing this roughly a decade (or more) ago clearly correctly recognized that a flat capture to DSD256 would "extract and capture all the musical information on the original master tape" - a claim MoFi has always made about their process for both vinyl and SACD. They thought about it, and recognized it would be a wonderfully convenient and provably transparent step, which it is. This is why the engineers were like "yeah sure we do that" when it was brought up with them. They didn't even see it as a thing to hide because 1. it doesn't matter, they're right 2. see previous comment about the market changing around them.
I don't think this is malice as much as it is "we've always done it this way" on MoFi's side+people making assumptions and not really paying attention as the AAA vinyl "cut off of the master tapes in the same room" fad picked up steam post-vinyl-resurgence in recent years.
They've now updated their ad copy with more detail, everyone's records still sound the same, no one has lost anything - that's a win win.
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