No problem! I like the MFSL much better than the 2003 also. I did compare the original CD recently and liked the MFSL better. The original CD is nice sounding on it's own, but sounds a little grainy compared to the MFSL. On some tracks the EQ is warmer on the original CD, but on other tracks it sounds thinner and brighter. Wedding Song was the clincher for me. The original CD and the 2003 remaster sound quite thin and the Mofi sounds nice and full and warm. The glitches on Something There Is About You are unfortunate though. I just used Audacity to level match and speed match (something like -1.1%) the 2003 to the MFSL for that track and dropped it in - not one of my favorite songs on the album anyway.
@Joey_Corleone I couldn't find your comparison with a search. Do you have a link to it? I'd be interested to read what you think as I'm on the fence on prefering the Sony SACD stereo DSD mastering or the MoFi.
I think this is it: #533 I'm curious to hear your comparisons as well, although since I don't have SACD capabilities I'll probably stick with the Mofi regardless.
Don't forget that the MFSL edition also fails to include Robbie's guitar intro to "Dirge For Martha" so you need to add that from another source.
Yeah that is pretty disappointing too, but it bothers me less than those awful clicks during Something There Is About You. I could even get past the high pitched whine if that was the only issue, but those clicks (especially the first one) just hurt my ears...
Thank you! Although the MoFi is a different and warmer presentation, with probably even less or no compression, I think I kinda prefer the tonality and and the pacing on the Sony SACD. I'll have to compare them back to back someday. Unfortunately the Redbook layer on the Sony SACD has the standard 2001 CD mastering.
From Street Legal to Empire Burlesque, inclusive...I’m in for that! And now that Pat Garrett is in the works, Self Portrait would complete the run to 1975 nicely.
Good call. Besides restoring that quiet intro to "Dirge" (how did they miss that?) I also took the extra step of swapping "You Angel You" for the studio outtake of "Nobody 'Cept You." A nice start-to-finish listen now.
Pat Garrett has always been in my top 5 (Maybe even 3) Dylan albums for some reason. It’s such a relaxing listen, and I love the 3 ‘Billy’ tunes. I was so happy that Mofi released it.
It is strange in that aside from the mono Blonde on Blonde and Self Portrait MFSL has done everything up to and including Desire. Was there a vinyl MFSL of Pat Garrett?
Would certainly be nice for Mofi to fill in some of those gaps. I would love a Mofi Self Portrait and mono BoB, but I wouldn’t expect too much from the latter based on the tape used and resulting sound from the mono box. They also skipped the 1973 Dylan album, but based on listening to the original CD and 2013 remaster I’d guess the master tapes are either lost or shot... either that or just a dreadful mastering job [2013] with wayyy to much high end applied to compensate for a murky mix.
I just noticed the sacd and vinyl don't have the Original Master banner. Are those tapes missing too? And is Love and Theft planned for a vinyl release? It was once, then disappeared. I lost track on this one. The master is analog, that's why I'd like to have it done properly for vinyl.
I was told by Music Direct that the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab banner is used when they are unsure if the tape that was used was the master tape. They only use the Original Master Recording banner when they are certain that they have the master tape. And MFSL has defined the master tape as being the original master for the original mix or the original master for the remix, like with Kind Of Blue, for example.
I just came across a Tape Op interview with Bob Ludwig regarding mastering digital in the '80s. One question that's popped up in other threads was how early all-digital recordings like Dylan's Infidels or McCartney's Tug of War were mastered for CD. Some later albums with PCM digital masters were more or less transferred straight to CD (Calbi said he did this for Oh Mercy) so would the same apply for older digital albums? Apparently not: Bob Ludwig: I started working with digital in 1978, when I mastered and cut a recording for Telarc, for vinyl, on the Soundstream digital machine. Until the invention of the Neve DTC-1 digital domain mastering console in 1987, and the Daniel Weiss BW-102, there was no way to master and stay in the digital domain. One always had to play back the digital master through a not-so-great Sony PCM-1610 digital-to-analog converter [DAC], do all the mastering in the analog world, and re-record it back into digital through an even less-good analog-to-digital [ADC] Sony converter for CD — first the Sony PCM-1600, then 1610 and finally the 1630. For a while, as everything was 16-bit — even for post-production and mastering — simple level changes sounded dicey in the digital domain. Digital equalization was initially so horrible and brittle; no one would use it. The PCM-1600 converters were a "ripped from the textbook" industrial design converter that had all those sound qualities you describe. Some great digital recordings, like the Rush's Moving Pictures CD, were recorded with it; but the artists and producers mixed while listening through its output, so they adjusted EQs and levels to accommodate the sound of the converter. The invention of the CD meant that there were now tens of thousands, and then millions, of DACs being sold and all R&D went into developing better DACs. I remember when there were no more than a handful of ADCs in all of New York City! The analog to digital converter took a while for developers to really pay attention to it. In my opinion, it wasn't until the middle 1990's that some really first-rate converters were invented. The first Sony digital editors, which were necessary for creating the CD masters, did not have dither. Even their manual suggested passing through the -60 dB area of the fader as quickly as possible to avoid digital distortion when one had to do a digital fade! The widespread use of dither — which makes low-level digital go from horribly distorted into extremely low distortion, and gives the ability to hear sounds below the least significant bit, was a major leap in the improvement of CD sound. Bob Ludwig: Master of Mastering
After some experimenting, I found that after matching up the first guitar strum in both versions, -1.077 is pretty exact (There's a little bit of phasing but it's still quite precise). Also a -2 db makes the 2003 fit in with the rest of the mofi a little more.
Yup I also did some level matching and EQ on my version. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but I used audacity to find the difference in EQ between them and apply that to the 2003. Basically add a bit of bass, cut a few dB around 2k - 3k and maybe add a couple dB around 10k or 12.5k if I remember correctly?
Hey George - I did a long time ago and preferred the MFSL at the time (with the caveat that the MFSL is ****ed for Something There Is About You and missing the intro to Dirge). My recollection is the original CD sounded sort of midrangey and like it wasn’t from a great tape source. I remember thinking Wedding Song in particular sounded a lot more natural on the MFSL. But again that comparison was done a while ago and I no longer have the original CD…
