Washington Post article on MoFi vs. Fremer vs. Esposito

This is a First World Problem, to be sure.  Let’s face it that like Wine Tasters, audiophiles can be easily duped.  Why?  Because there is more than one way to arrive at excellent sound. Mid Fi equipment today performs at a fantastic level compared to 30 years ago.  It makes it easy for to claim some special process is going on when the reality is there is nothing beyond baseline competence and clever marketing 

What is the difference between a "Professional" Audio Journalist and an amateur?

Presumably the pro gets paid for what he or she does and the amateur doesn't.  Knowledge wise there may be no difference at all, and it is quite possible that the amateur has more knowledge in our hobby.  It isn't as if there is some graduate degree in Audio Equipment Reviewing

+1 @gpgr4blu 

I'm a Physician.  I am not a fan of lawsuits.  However if it deters companies going forward from actively misleading people to make a buck, then it has a purpose.

I was able to read the article because my wife has a Washington Post subscription.

I am a confirmed digitalphile.  Some years back it was revealed that many lp reissues that were lauded to the skies by the likes of Fremer and Art Dudley were using digital masters due to the sticky tape phenomenon.  Basically this means that master tapes over the years tend to congeal into a sticky blob and the tapes were prone to fracturing , thus limiting the ability to use them for new issues.  Instead many of these reissues were pressed from digital transfers made in the nineties when the tapes were more useable

.  When this was revealed the analog gurus didn’t miss a beat.  They either chose to ignore this or somehow claimed that embedding a digital file in a slab of petroleum and extracting that file with analog players was superior to leaving the same file in the digital domain.

@vonhelmholtz 

Washington Post isn’t my preferred source of reading either, and I had to use my wife’s pw to read the article.  However they seem to have gotten this right, and I suspect that MF probably approves of most of the content of the paper.  Fremer has a lot to lose financially if the taste for vinyl were ever to recede

1) MoFi lied in order to dupe the Analog or Die! Consumers.  They Knowingly committed fraud

2). Many recordings they made sound excellent, apparently due to the DSD process

  Conclusions

1) MoFi should be punished. They didn’t commit murder or child abuse, and the duped audiophiles probably aren’t going to miss any meals, so in our current environment of of Law Unenforcement I don’t expect any significant Legal Penalty.  However their Customers can vote with their wallets.  Music Direct, the parent company, should be included in the boycot.  I say this with distaste as I live a few miles from their headquarters and have bought several times from them, but they have abused our trust

2)  As for the Analog or Die! Crowd-isn’t it about time to admit that Digital can sound excellent?  Does this make any sense to take a digital file, convert it to analog, bake those files into a petroleum product, extract those analog file with an expensive needle slashing through the grooves with each playing, spend tons of dish on products that attempt to miniseries the artifacts in the entire process?  Really, it’s o.k. Folks to buy equipment that keeps the file in the digital domain and free of all the artifact.  Unless you live for the artifact

MoFi has an interview on their site with their President being interviewed by TAS

I tried to copy the link but failed

At least as printed on the MoFi website, the questions lobbed to Davis are all marshmellows.  Presumably because MoFi advertises on TAS