Mobile Fidelity VS Re-mastered

Old MFSL has not aged well. They played with the EQ a lot and in many cases worsened the quality of the music. I bought a copy of The Chieftain's "The Long Black Veil" when it came out. I have liked this CD a lot since I first heard it. When I saw the MFSL copy of the same CD for sale at CES I was tempted, but my experience with their CDs, and LPs in the past was less than stellar.

Last year I bought Aimee Mann's Lost in Space in spite of my expereince. It sounded good. So I decided to get the Chieftain's CD. It was very good too.

Based on all of these experiences, I would not buy MFSL unless it was done in the last two years. A remaster by someone else would sound as good if not better.

It depends on the CD. For the most part I find MFSL to be superior still to the remasters. A lot depends on exactly when the remasters were remastered. I would say the MFSL's are better than anything remastered prior to 2000 or so except for a couple I noted below.

As a side note, on a trip through the local Best Buy the other day I noticed a lot of CD's with the "remastered" label on them. Upon closer examination, a lot were remastered in the mid to late 90's with 20-bit remastering. Be sure and read the date as to when the disc was remastered!

I have all the Moody Blues and Rush CD's on MFSL and had bought a couple of the "remasters" of the Moody Blues and Rush for comparison. In each case the MFSL was far superior. The remaster of the Rush and the Moody Blues were both 20-bit done in the late '90's however. I also have Robin Trower's Bridge of Sighs and it is fantastic on MFSL.

Don't get me wrong there are a couple of titles that I like the remaster of better. Elton John's Goodbye Yellow.. and Pink Floyd's The Wall are two examples where I like the remasters better but this isn't entirely fair as the MFSL editions of these albums were done in the early '90's before the "UltraGainII" system they employed (a 20-bit remaster).

All I have said above is based on my experience owning both versions. Keep in mind however that I bought the MFSL discs new, at the music store in the 90's for under $25 a pop (sometimes under $20). The last I looked, some of these titles were selling for $50 or more. At this point you are definately talking diminishing returns.

Ive had MF Lps of DSOM, Crime of the Century and a few others in the past and did find the quality of them was better.

I've found the same equalisation problems that Nrchy has founds as well. Jow Walsh Barnstorm on MFSL CD is one where the bass seems overstated. A few other MFSls I have are just fine in that respect.

The remastereds dont have the EQ problem(Duke, Bat out of hell, transformer, security, machine head) and sound much clearer than the original cd releases such as US by P.G. which sounds just awful.

Anyways thanks for all the feedback. Will save me tons of dough as the MFSLs I have to import but the re-mastereds are available locally.