Half speed masters. Are they worth the extra scratch?

Good humor and facts. Thanks MC.

I've got a half speed master of The Police ’Ghost In The Machine’. The drum intro for ’Spirits In The Material Wild’ will knock your socks off. You hear the air and decay on the drums. Impact and attack is startling to say the least...the toms sound like they were in the room.

I think having a dialed in Technics 1200G with a nice microline stylus certainly helps. But yeah, well worth the little hit in cost.

I've mastered a handful of releases at half speed, have one to do in 2 weeks time for a composer from the Bavarian State Opera who's completed a modern chamber music / electronic hybrid 2xLP. I find that works with vast dynamics suit half speed, as well as very quiet works where surface noise is a real threat, not to mention pre-delay. And then there is DMM. There was a moment after the Apollo Pressing plant burned down where it was assumed there'd be an uptick in DMM, but thankfully none of my business was with Apollo so I got out unscathed. However, there are still DMM diehards, if you can find the machinery. I recently saw this article (below) and this studio offers DMM dubplates for 700eu! Not to say I don't have $1000+ records and loads of one-off dublplates, but nothing this extreme and purist! Might have to try it someday. https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/copper-listens-to-copper-stockfisch-records-dmm-dubplate-vol-...

Tom Port got after me about some of the misinformation above. No, not mine. Others. He has a point. But the parts I explained are perfectly clear, and true. 

Rather than try and set the record straight let me just say not everything claimed to be from the original master, or half speed mastered, or whatever, actually is as claimed.   

For example, an "Original Master Recording" from MoFi so hilariously obviously NOT from the original master- Al Stewart Year of the Cat - was so bad it did not even have the piano in the beginning of On the Border, at all. By "at all" I mean "at all". Not buried deep down in the mix. Not muffled hard to make out. "AT ALL!" 

This particular pressing was so bad I sent it to Tom just to play, to show anyone just how truly awful a reissue can be. I have a very normal beat up and played a lot average vintage copy that is light years better than this MoFi. Tom sold me a White Hot Stamper and you better believe it is light years better than my average vintage copy.  

There are so many steps in the chain, so many opportunities for dreck to creep in, it is a miracle there are any good records out there at all. In any format. With LP, add to that the challenge of squishing plastic into grooves the size of a organic molecule. No wonder the only way to know for sure is to drop the needle and listen. 

That is what Tom Port does every day. If you really care about sound quality that is what you will do too. Or pay Tom to do it for you. That you can rely on. Labels that say half speed mastered, audiophile, original master, etc, those you cannot rely on. At all. 

MoFi has it’s detractors (obviously), and the company is to blame for their spotty record (ouch ;-) . However, one needs to know that not all Mobile Fidelity LP’s are created equally. You need to know about the history of the company, who was doing the mastering, plating, and pressing at the time a reissue was done. The sound characteristics can be broken down into two separate phases: the current Music Direct-owned releases, and those of the former ownership.

The MoFi Beatles LP’s, for example, are not as good as original UK LP’s. I had a complete set of both UK Parlophone (stereo) and MoFi pressings (just ’cause I could), but when the mono boxset was released I sold all my MoFi’s, the proceeds of which many times over paid for the box.

On the other hand, most "current" MoFi’s are really, really good. Whereas Stan Ricker was doing the mastering at MoFi in the 70’s and 80’s (and is responsible for the bass-heavy sound of the Beatles LP’s---he was a bass player ;-) , MoFi’s current team is one of the very best in the world.

Then there is Analogue Productions. In my opinion they are making the best LP’s the world has ever seen, uh, heard. Chad Kassem takes making records VERY seriously, and his products show it. If you want proof of that, at 12:00 noon CST tomorrow (Saturday, 5-8) on the YouTube channel "45 RPM Audiophile", there is going to be a live stream panel discussion about making records. The participants will be Chad, Classic Records owner Mike Hobson, mastering engineer Bernie Grundman, the production manager at QRP (Kassem’s LP manufacturing facility in Salina, KS), Michael Fremer, and Mr. 45 RPM Audiophile, Michael in Germany.

As to half-speed mastering, that was a fad in the waning days of the original LP reign. I recently read a mastering engineer explain that while running the tapes at half speed DOES provide an improvement in high frequencies, it comes at the cost of worse low frequency sound. None of the current audiophile reissue companies proudly proclaim their LP’s are half-speed mastered. ’Cause they’re not.