Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

haha those are good choices! great sound on both tracks

ums that's kinda funny and reminds me of a guy i crossed paths with in my music retail days...
he read all the audiophile snakeoil mags/features and so would hear about the highest fidelity recordings ―stuff made by established experts who, no snark, knew exactly what they were doing― and that ended up being quite a bit of experimental music. pretty funny to see a guy buy all the hdcd rolling stones reissues, along with his special order of the david sylvian blemish remix album (it got high marks in terms of fidelity).

yeah some of them have more diverse tastes than you might think and even the reference album canon evolves over time, like I see Random Access Memories and Mezzanine by Massive Attack a fair amount now, the first Norah Jones record..Buena Vista Social Club

True story, aged 17 in 1987 I was introduced to Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak by a hifi store person demoing speakers I could never afford using “Gravity’s Angel”. Drums sounded spectacular but the track itself blew my mind.
Didn’t buy the speakers but I bought the CD when I found it a few months later.

all the cream electrets and shakti stones can make you forget that some of these fellas actually Love Music

t/s only being able to listen to the mofi catalogue in hi fidelity or whatever you want on your cell phone speaker

I'd have to think about that tbh

yeah, same. genuinely good philosophical problem to pose in this topic!

not a moment's hesitation, phone

oooh I am definitely hesitating - once I would have been phone no question - but after tasting the succulent fruits of mid-fi sound reproduction it is hard to settle for tinny distortion and no bass

maybe this is just my body's way of telling me it is time to get better acquainted with the Supertramp discography

Scrolling through the Mofi artist list on the site there are about a dozen I'm interested in ever hearing again. I don't care if At Folsom Prison sounds like I'm in the cafeteria, I want to hear it once a year, tops. I will take my phone over becoming a Deadhead out of necessity.

I see hundreds of albums I'd gladly listen to (and this isn't the full catalog):

https://www.discogs.com/label/35095-Mobile-Fidelity-Sound-Lab

hi please feel free to make fun of me for asking a real question about a real thing in here but idk anywhere/anyone else that might have any clue what i'm talking about...

do ya'll know why (on mostly pre-digital) recordings in the "silence" before the song actually starts, you can still hear the song starting? on some really dynamic recordings (mostly jazz) that go from quiet>LOUD quickly in the middle of the song, you can also get a tiny, nearly inaudible, preview of the impending loud part just a second or two before it hits. what is this phenomenon? it seems like it was (is?) a vinyl thing?

anybody know what i'm talking about?

smdh at using "Godstar" instead of something off Dreams Less Sweet, the one they did with Zuccarelli holophonics

xpost I think that’s a tape thing

yes it's called pre-echo or something, basically bleedthrough, it's a tape thing

yeah, it's the tape head reading the next layer of the tape through the current layer (because tape is coiled around a dowel)

or however you'd say that, wound, words are hard

okay...
excuse my persistence, and ty for the answer, but i'm having a hard time understanding how that tranlates to me being able to hear it on john coltrane recordings when i listen on spotify.

the masters everything comes from are tapes right

^^

so wait... that "pre-echo" is in the master too? like if i was listening to the actual master tape, it would be there too?

that blows my mind in highly cosmic, existential ways but i'm weird. ty everyone for answering. would love any deepdives into the topic if you know any.

weird shit, man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-echo

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pre-echo-present-on-lp.229120/

sleeve according to wikipedia at least preecho refers to digital compression artifacts. the tape phenomenon is “print-through” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print-through

thank you!

Digital tapes can also be affected by contact print effects in a phenomenon known as "bit-shift" when upper or lower layers of tape cause a middle layer to alter the pulses recorded to represent binary information.

/\freaking me out.

^^ one of many reasons why Albini hated DAT iirc #onethread

i am genuinely unsettled by it. in a purely wordless emotional way that i can only compare to the feeling experienced by the phrase "uncanny valley." but it's an entirely different vibe because it's some real ghost in the machine shit.

tyvm for those links btw

yeah this is a total rabbit hole

DuPont[3] in conjunction with Otari[4] invented a form of thermal magnetic duplication ("TMD") by which a high-coercivity metal mother master tape was brought into direct contact with a chromium dioxide copy (slave) tape. The coercivity of the mother tape is higher than that of the copy tape, so when the copy tape is heated and brought into contact with the mother tape, the copy tape gets a mirror image of the signal on the mother tape without the mother tape losing its signal. The recording on the mother tape was a mirror image of a valid video signal. Immediately before the copy tape came into contact with the mother tape, a focused laser beam heated it to its Curie point at which its value of coercivity dropped to very low values so that it picked up a near perfect copy of the mother tape as it cooled.[5][6] The mother tape was made using a special reel to reel video tape recorder called a mirror master recorder[7] and was held inside the machine in an endless loop. This system could achieve speeds of up to 300 times playback speed in NTSC VHS SP mode, 900 times in VHS EP mode and 428 times in PAL/SECAM tapes.[8]

DAT tape always struck me as a "worst of both worlds" idea

DAT was a godsend to concert tapers, so I can't disparage it - it totally had its uses.