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Simon and Garfunkel "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" MOFI UD1S

I’ve had my copies for awhile now and have had a chance to listen to it several times. This is the newest Mobile Fidelity "One-Step", (UD1S) that was just finally released.

While this is on par with the first three UD1S reissues, it just falls a little short. I think maybe I was expecting too much?

It’s a fantastic recording and sounds superb, but it left me puzzled. The first side is excellent, very quiet and dynamic. Side 2 with the song "Cecilia" is just SUPERB! It’s hard to say that the track "Cecilia" alone is worth the price of admission, well, because $100 for one song is kinda silly, but WOW, this track is really, really good. Side three is kinda weird and seems to vary from song to song. This can be said to a much lesser degree for the whole album, but side three is inconsistent. This could just be the way the tapes are now, many years later.

I did compare this to my US first pressing and my UK first pressing and this UD1S is better in every way. Quieter, more dynamic, deeper bass, cleaner vocals and way more open sounding.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a WONDERFUL album and recording and I highly recommended it, but not as highly as the first three...
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folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak
1,349 posts
 
@stevecham. My bad, oddly I’d say the MoFi makes Art sound like Paul :-)  the classic retains more of the difference between the two voices IMO
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,419 posts
 
Great comparative review folkfreak! I prefer Paul solo (his first two, especially. He lost me on Graceland; not great songwriting imo), Garfunkel's voice being too lightweight for me. I prefer Baritones to Countertenors ;-) . Garfunkel has a "better" voice than Simon, but I don't care about that.
slaw's avatar
slaw
20,405 posts
 
"I’d say the MoFi makes Art sound like Paul:-"

NOT!

How could anyone make that comparison?

"Garfunkel has a better voice than Simon, but I don't care about that"

WOW! I DO CARE about that! Their whole importance, their  very existence as their history in the history of recorded music suggests nothing less.
wcfeil
464 posts
 
>>How could anyone make that comparison?<<

Play it backwards through a Leslie. 
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,419 posts
 
slaw, my putting "better" in quotation marks was deliberate, for a reason. Better in terms of technique (a voice as an instrument) and being "prettier", but those are only two element in a singers voice, and not at all the most important to me. I do appreciate Art’s abilities at harmonizing, though. While he has his faults (to put it mildly), David Crosby is a REAL good harmony singer.
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