Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is a couple of days old, but I don’t think it has gotten a lot of attention, and it lightly pushes some of my buttons.

There’s a company called Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi. They press records. They also have some recordings available in SACD format, and sell record accessories and electronics. I talked to Mike the Musicologist, and he owns some of their SACD recordings, which I will take as a qualified endorsement.

MoFi’s big deal was that they supposedly used “original master tapes” for their recordings.

In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.

Mike Esposito runs a record store in Phoenix, “The ‘In’ Groove”. He put up a video on July 14th claiming that, contrary to their advertising, MoFi “had actually been using digital files in its production chain” for their re-issues. (And apparently it wasn’t just re-issues of material that was originally recorded digitally.)

(Remember the early days of CD audio and the SPARS code? Wasn’t that a time?)

Anyway, a lot of audiophiles attacked Mr. Esposito for posting the video and implying MoFi’s claims were not legit.

MoFi, for their part, invited Mr. Esposito to visit them in California. So he went out there, and sat down with some of MoFi’s engineers…

That visit resulted in a second video, published July 20, in which MoFi’s engineers confirmed, with a kind of awkward casualness, that Esposito was correct with his claims. The company that made its name on authenticity had been deceptive about its practices. The episode is part of a crisis MoFi now concedes was mishandled.

I think this is that video.

“They were completely deceitful,” says Richard Drutman, 50, a New York City filmmaker who has purchased more than 50 of MoFi’s albums over the years. “I never would have ordered a single Mobile Fidelity product if I had known it was sourced from a digital master.”

…

“Not that you can’t make good records with digital, but it just isn’t as natural as when you use the original tape,” says Bernie Grundman, 78, the mastering engineer who worked on the original recordings of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”

As you know, Bob, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the kind of audiophile who spends $5,000 on a turntable for their 78 RPM records. On the other hand, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for companies that get people to buy stuff by lying to them. On the gripping hand, who am I to look down on these people, when I spend a fair amount of my disposable income on obscure Smith and Wessons and first editions?

Mobile Fidelity and its parent company, Music Direct, were slow to respond to the revelation. But last week, the company began updating the sourcing information on its website and also agreed to its first interview, with The Washington Post. The company says it first used DSD, or Direct Stream Digital technology, on a 2011 reissue of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” By the end of 2011, 60 percent of its vinyl releases incorporated DSD. All but one of the reissues as part of its One-Step series, which include $125 box-set editions of Santana, Carole King and the Eagles, have used that technology. Going forward, all MoFi cutting will incorporate DSD.

…

Marketing has been a key element of the MoFi model. Most releases include a banner on the album cover proclaiming it the “Original Master Recording.” And every One-Step, which cut out parts of the production process to supposedly get closer to the original tape, includes a thick explainer sheet in which the company outlines in exacting detail how it creates its records. But there has been one very important item missing: any mention of a digital step.
The company has obscured the truth in other ways. MoFi employees have done interviews for years without mentioning digital. In 2020, Grant McLean, a Canadian customer, got into a debate with a friend about MoFi’s sourcing. McLean believed in the company and wrote to confirm that he was right. In a response he provided to The Post, a customer service representative wrote McLean that “there is no analog to digital conversion in our vinyl cutting process.”

…

The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good that they can fool even the best of ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer’s and Esposito’s own lists of the best-sounding analog albums.

What else is there to say? Other than, if you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?