• The Curious Case of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab - I know from a couple previous drafts of this post that it’s damn hard not to go into the techie weeds with this story. Most people who will read it have no skin in the game, including me, so the minutiae is borderline excruciating. But it’s an interesting tale of a large American company’s utter PR failure. It’s been picked up by the Washington Post, and is the subject of class-action lawsuits firing up around the country, so it is, to some degree, news. I’ll try again to keep it readable, and not just a story for obsessive vinyl collectors and speculators.
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, aka MoFi, makes vinyl records. Specifically, they make high-dollar, limited edition “audiophile” records. One of their biggest claims to fame is that they create their vinyl pressing masters directly from the original analog studio master tapes, with no digital transfers or remastering, on the highest quality vinyl currently available. MoFi has been a major beneficiary of the vinyl sales boom of the last few years, their new releases sell out, often astonishingly quickly, and most of them fetch more than their original selling price on secondary markets like Discogs and eBay. Their label's products are some of the record world's most commonly "flipped," bought at retail to sell at a higher price when the production run is over.
If I’m not mistaken, it was May when Mofi’s shit hit the fan. They breathlessly announced they would be releasing a 40th Anniversary edition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, using their most expensive “One-Step” process. To meet anticipated demand, they said they'd be pressing an unprecedented 40,000 copies. The news was met with excitement from MoFi and Thriller fans, and a profound level of skepticism by some high-profile YouTube record collecting and selling content creators. The little bit of techie weeds I have to go into here explains why popular hosts like Michael Ludwigs in Dusseldorf and Mike Esposito, who owns The In Groove record store in Phoenix, called bullshit.
As I mentioned above, recordings that claim to be “all-analog” have to use an album’s original studio master tape to create their vinyl record stampers. But those stampers have a limited life span, and degrade around 1000 pressings or so, exactly the reason MoFi’s previous releases have been limited in quantity. To make 40,000 copies of Thriller, MoFi would have to run the master tape to make a new stamper 40 – 50 times. Sony owns the Thriller master tape, and keeps it in a highly secure, climate-controlled vault to prevent excessive handling and magnetic recording tape’s natural degradation over time. The idea that they would allow it to be played that many times seemed ludicrous to people in the know and, as it turned out, rightfully so.
Overnight, the record collector world was buzzing with videos and articles calling out MoFi for some sort of nefarious misdirection. The uproar caused MoFi to invite Mr. Esposito to visit their facility in California and talk to their people about it, a meeting he accepted and filmed for his channel. Neither the company president or any member of their public relations or marketing departments sat in on the meeting, Esposito was left alone with three of MoFi’s production engineers. The trio casually confirmed that no record label allows them to use master tapes in their production facility. They travel to wherever the label stores the tapes, make a one-time DSD digital copy on premises, and bring the digital file back to California to manufacture their “all-analog” vinyl records. (It was Esposito’s meeting with the engineers that was the foundation of the WaPo article.)
Has MoFi been lying to their customers all these years? Collectors and other skeptics started reading the fine print on their releases with a fine-tooth comb and came to the conclusion that while MoFi has always implied that their product is 100% all-analog from mastering to manufacturing, they’ve never actually said it, or claimed that they don’t use a digital step in the process. Collectors and retailers (and secondary market speculators) started howling about “transparency” when they were being polite, and “fraud” when they weren’t.
All-analog LPs are certainly possible, there are a number of small, boutique labels releasing truly digital-free vinyl records around the world. They have very limited production runs and premium prices, for the most part. One of the slow, grudging steps MoFi has been taking in recent days is to update its website with more accurate info about each release’s sourcing, making it obvious that their legions of fans and collectors have been buying digitally sourced records pretty much in every instance since 2015. Apparently, they’ve been successfully expanding (and dominating) the market for “audiophile” LPs by taking some undisclosed shortcuts and blowing some smoke. Their public response has been slow, defensive, and not a little condescending. For example, customers are free to cancel their pre-orders for upcoming titles, but MoFi has instituted a cancellation process that’s not as intuitive or easy as it should be. It’s not “one-step,” so to speak.
As I said at the top, there are going to be a lot of people who aren’t going to give a flying you-know-what about this whole mess. Retailers are pissed, because their customers are, vinyl speculators and re-sellers are claiming MoFi’s misinformation devalued their inventory (it’s too soon to tell if that’s true.) Personally, I own a small number of MoFi releases (never spent the long dollar for a One-Step,) and I’m glad to have them. Without exception, they sound better than any other LP or CD version of the title I’ve heard. My fascination with the whole mess has been how poorly a successful American manufacturer has responded to a PR nightmare. Their messaging, in a nutshell, seems to be “you liked ‘em before you found out, no reason not to like (and buy) ‘em now.” Seriously, MoFi, you should have called me, I could’ve helped with that.
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