Writing about the way a record sounds presents some interesting challenges, particularly when writing for an audiophile audience. With no single audiophile system sounding the same as any other, and with each system playing in a completely different room, none of us hears a record sound exactly the same as another. In fact, the differences in how each of us hears even the very same copy of record can vary substantially.
Nevertheless, as someone passionate about sharing his experiences in this endlessly fascinating hobby of analog audio, I’m compelled to make my best effort to describe to others what it is that I hear when I play a record on my system. I hope I am at least occasionally successful, but I’ll leave that up to my readers to decide for themselves.
As my stereo has improved, and as I’ve been fortunate to find better and better records to play on it, I’m hearing one particular “sound” more and more often. I find myself craving this sound. Every time I hear it, I want to hear more of it. But every time I try to put this sound into words, I can never seem to find them.
Perhaps that’s because this sound is, on the surface, so very ordinary. It is the sound of voices and instruments playing in a space, captured by microphones and reproduced without apparent modification or adulteration. It is the sound of music, played by musical artists and played back with a level of fidelity so high as to liberate these musicians and their music from the very medium on which they are preserved.
Recorded music that has this sound is almost entirely free of artifice. We don’t listen to it and necessarily think we are hearing a recording. Instead, this sound tricks us into thinking and feeling we are witnessing these artists perform, right there in front of us, as though for us. It is the very pinnacle of what audiophiles mean when they say “the speakers disappeared,”an expression I find more than a little overused.
This sound is, in my view, what the analog medium is all about. Regardless of the fact that records do not play quietly the way digital music does, digital music simply cannot convey this sound. It is a sound so pure, so natural and so achingly real that it relegates the surface noise on a record into a barely noticed afterthought.
Yesterday I played a copy of Joni Mitchell’s iconic masterpiece, Blue, and I heard this sound. At one point, I wasn’t listening to a record anymore. I heard Joni, in the studio, with Stephen Stills, and with James Taylor. I heard her voice come to life and soar free as though liberated from the confines of the recording she’d made over 50 years ago.
Today, I played Mobile Fidelity’s newly released Ultradisc One-Step version of Blue, and I thought it sounded rather good, especially after I got the VTA set right for the thicker vinyl. It did a nice job with the vocals, which is clearly essential for the album.
On the wrong vintage copy, or even with a very good copy played back on the wrong system, Joni’s closely mic’d vocals can sound glaring and shrill, particularly on the opening track, “All I Want.” MoFi’s One-Step of Blue mostly handled the vocals well, and it did so pretty much throughout the album, conveying the sweetness and breathiness of Mitchell’s voice and avoiding the glare.
The MoFi also did a pretty good job with the piano, an instrument featured on “My Old Man” and a few other tracks. It managed to give the instrument the size and the weight you want to hear from a piano, although I didn’t find it as life-like and musical as I did on the vintage copies I played.
For the first few songs, I starting to think I really liked MoFi’s One-Step of Blue. That is, until the fourth track, “Carey,” when the record started to show its true colors. “Carey” features Joni on the Dulcimer, and this instrument reveals the top end boost that MoFi gave this version in a particularly obvious way.
Notes that rang pleasantly and clearly in space on the vintage copies sounded aggressive and edgy on the One-Step. And once this boost was revealed on the dulcimer, it became more apparent on the guitars and vocals as well. As I listened, I began to realize that the Joni I was hearing on this One-Step was not the same Joni I was hearing on the vintage copies.
The One-Step was mastered by Krieg Wunderlich, and in typical MoFi fashion, Mr. Wunderlich has boosted not just the top end on this version, but also the bottom. In fairness, if there was ever a record that might need just a little more bass, Blue is it. There’s not a lot of bass on this recording, and I can certainly understand anyone remastering it wanting to add some, just to flesh it out a bit.
But does that necessarily mean they should add it? Does more bass always equal better sound? On the only track that actually has any real bass on this album, “California,” the bass on the One-Step sounds like the bass on a modern recording – big and weighty, but with a modern studio bloomy deadness that I hear on just about every contemporary jazz recording.
The One-Step of Blue, in fact, sounds more like a modern record than it does one recorded back in 1971. It’s as though Wunderlich has mastered the original studio sound right out of it, and in doing so, lost something crucial to what made the recording special to begin with.
Blue is an intimate record that lives and breathes in the midrange. Mitchell’s songs are personal, and the way she produced the album serves to place us, the listener, up close to her performance. She invites us in, and this is what makes the sound I spoke of earlier so crucial to this music.
For Blue to come to life the way it can, we need not just the vocals and the instruments to sound right, we also need to hear the studio space they’re playing in. That’s the quality that this One-Step lacks and that the best vintage copies have the ability to convey. When the studio space is there, audible in the recording, we have that very special sound I referred to earlier. We have the sound of being right there in the studio with Joni and the other musicians.
The One-Step pushes the vocals and most of the instruments forward. It’s a sound I’ve heard on a lot of other modern remastered records. With these records, our listening room must substitute for the studio space, rather than the original studio space being recreated for us in our listening room. It’s a subtle distinction that becomes less and less subtle the more that you hear it. Provided, of course, that your system and the records you play have the ability to show it to you.
Not every listener will hear what’s missing from this One-Step. With most modern audiophile systems struggling to reproduce the subtle transients that make a record like Blue so compelling, I’d guess that most will not. I could even see how a lot of audiophiles would prefer this One-Step to even the best vintage copies. After all, it’s hard to find a vintage copy of Blue that plays quietly AND sounds good, and this MoFi checks both those boxes.
But make no mistake, something is missing on this MoFi, and it’s not something that can be brought back by playing it on a “better” or more expensive system. Some of the precious life of Blue has been lost in this One-Step, and it simply cannot be resuscitated. The only way to bring that life back is to find a great vintage copy and build a stereo that can play it back well.
This is why I recommend finding the best vintage versions of the records we love. They’re the only records that at least have the potential to give us the one thing this One-Step never will – the sound of live musicians playing live in a studio. Vintage records are the only records I’ve ever heard that have “that sound.”
Having said all of this, I want to reiterate that MoFi’s One-Step of Blue is not a bad record. To my ears, Wunderlich took a fairly light touch to it. IMO it’s a good sounding record that will make many of the people who spend the $100+ it’ll cost them to buy a copy pretty happy.
But this MoFi is not a great sounding record, and for those like myself who know what greatness sounds like, I’ve little doubt we’d grow tired of it pretty quickly. For those of us who own and play records that have the sound I spoke of earlier – that sound!, we want more from a copy of Blue than this One-Step can give us. We want the real Joni, not the one on this MoFi.