The MoFi Mess and TAS rolling over for them


Totally disgusted with TAS opinions on the mofi mess. They're basically saying it was okay to dupe us.  Jonathan Valin actually says as long as it sounds good...

What a sell out to the audiophile community.  TAS is nothing but a glorified product catalogue for their advertisers.  

 

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it is obvious that the thousands of vinyl reissues that are currently released each week are not pressed from master tapes but from a CD or FLAC format. Not only do you have to be a bit silly to think of vinyl as Hifi, but you have to be downright dumb to believe that vinyl makers have access to all those tapes, that they're all still in usable condition , and that they have time to produce them on vinyl at this rate with analog one-step machines (without intermediate digital copies). The whole vinyl come back is a marketing bullshit.

I have always looked at TAS, and Stereophile mags as pure entertainment, it is very rare that I take their opinions seriously. It's like a comic book magazine...

 

I think the MOFI issue has been beaten into the ground and its time to move on. Not a vinyl guy myself, but I do have a large collection of their CD's that I have been collecting from the late 80's to the present. In most cases, I prefer the MOFI's sound to the standard CD issue but not always. I am sure their vinyls are the same: It boils down to preference. The odd thing about this is nobody could tell that they were listening to a digital file imbedded in their vinyl. They only way MOFI was  caught is the record store owner did the math and figured out that they could never release that many copies from an original tape. He could not or did not mention that he heard digital in the vinyl in his video. So my conclusion is that, despite what people think about how good their hearing is, it is very hard to discern source material when the listener has no idea what he or she is listening to. MoFi knew this and their deception has lasted about 7 years if their 2015 omission is accurate. It seems this is the trend in vinyl. I work in store that sells LP's and when I get bored, I read the covers. I noticed that I high percentage say they are OMR's remastered and transferred from digital files to vinyl. After the UMG fire, I wonder how many OMR's are real which could be another scandal in the making.

My feeling on the matter is this. Honesty matters to me. If I purchase a Mercedes from a dealer and get a Volkswagen that is wrong. Even though both are good German automobiles. It is not what I paid for and that's part of the problem. For people who thought they purchased Audio masters, not Digital masters were deceived. Not to say Digital did not sound good, it is a mater of trust you get what is advertised and if you did not there should be compensation returned. 

I don't think there was deceit. Perhaps not being as honest of every detail about each stage of the mastering. Does anyone care about the number of bits in the DSD file or the size and speed of the tapes used? Come on. 

All we should care about is the sound. If someone bought the records thinking they were 100% analogue and they are not, just sell them. I am sure you will get your money back, probably even make money.

Also, if the sound quality is just as good, who cares? I don't want to get sidetracked, but I am sure when you are buying a Mercedes you don't dig into the source of each component Mercedes assembles. They are overpriced with plenty of snob appeal built in, and because of their lack of reliability and extremely high cost of maintenance and repair, their resale value on the market is terrible.