I don’t understand why Jonathan attempts to create a balancing equation such that the apparently knowingly misleading statements by Mobile Fidelity (Jonathan: “Indeed, Mobile Fidelity‘s publicity has, I think, deliberately left the impression that everything is accomplished in the analog domain.” “Anyway you look at it, this was not full disclosure.“) somehow are offset because, or should be forgiven because, Mobile Fidelity profited from the business of re-mastering, pressing and selling LPs to consumers through the 1980s to the present day (Jonathan: “MoFi spent decades keeping the LP alive and kicking — releasing many, many sonic triumphs over that span . . . it would be worse than ungrateful of audiophiles not to show some charity here.”). I don’t think this proposed equation nets out to inculpability.
Jonathan appears not to consider that if consumers had known the truth about the digital step, then perhaps Mobile Fidelity would not have been as successful in business for decades selling its records and “keeping the LP alive.” I am not sure Jonathan should encourage Jim Davis to break his arm patting himself on the back for building a business, and even for helping to sustain an industry, based on a misrepresentation.
Is Jonathan suggesting that the end of keeping consumers buying records through the dark days of digital justified the means of the misrepresentation to sell re-issues? Numerous other companies were manufacturing and selling re-issues during the years in which Mobile Fidelity was selling its digital step vinyl records.
I see the misrepresentation issue as completely separate from the issue of “keeping the LP alive,” and as completely separate from the issue of the sound quality of Mobile Fidelity’s digital step vinyl records. I think that the former issue should not be conflated with, or means/ends justified by or excused by, either of the latter issues.
I give Jonathan credit for making the same point I made upon reading Jim Davis’ answers to Jonathan and Robert’s written questions: “If MoFi is as convinced of the sonic superiority of digital duplication and mastering as Jim Davis claims it is . . ., why conceal the fact?”