@newton_john (Hi to Olivia)
True DAT y'alls* *As they in NOLA (happy childhood days and still have plenty of lifetime down home time there..... but No Cal is where I hang my hat) |
My experience with audiophile LPs has been different from yours. I bought a lot of the first and second generation MFSL half-speed mastered LPs and various other audiophile LPs, and usually they are equal or superior to any digital counterpart, and much better than the conventional vinyl releases. (If you look at my Virtual System you will see that both my vinyl and digital rigs are quite good; I think they are comparable in quality.) Some must agree with the superiority of the older MFSL LPs, as last year I sold an unopened copy of Pink Floyd's Meddle LP for $1100! I am wary about buying new vinyl, audiophile or not. I've bought one newer MoFi LP (Santana's Abraxas), and even though that comes from a digital master (IIRC), it still sounds great. I'm more inclined now to buy SACDs, and have configured my digital rig so it will play the DSD stream, which Paul McGowan of PS Audio considers the best-sounding audio medium available. Very high-res digital streams can often equal or surpass vinyl, even some audiophile releases. I like the larger size of an LP jacket, so print is more readable, but that is far less important to me than the sound quality. |
Yes, I have heard a couple of very good MFSL pressings. It was years ago, at a show. One of them was (I believe) by Steppenwolf. I was impressed. It was really good. But my experience with MFSL is that their baseline is low quality (or strange sounding, in terms of unnatural equalization, etc). But they occasionally get it right (even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut). I do not relish purchasing barrels of bad apples, hoping to find a few delicious ones that might be in the barrel. Maybe MFSL has a better hit / miss ratio than has been my experience. I tend to stop patronizing a company’s products, once I have had a pattern of bad experiences. MFSL should be getting it right 100% of the time. It is the entire point of their "Original Master Recording" mantra. I would even settle for 90% of the time. But can you imagine if movies were released, and only 90% of them had proper picture quality?
MFSL has convinced a lot of people that their pressings are the de-facto standard for excellence, the way Bose has done that for its speakers. There are countless people that believe that Bose is the best brand, no matter the price. I am not knocking Bose. I am making a marketing point. MFSL has done for pressings what Bose has done for speakers. Your unopened Pink Floyd pressing is a win / win, because countless people see it as an amazing band from the best vinyl company known to mankind. But does that pressing have outstanding sound quality? I purchased a MFSL, Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon, and it is not good. I purchased a MFSL, Yazoo, Upstairs At Eric’s, and it has no relationship to anything resembling good sound quality. And there were a dozen others, before I accepted that MFSL pressings suck, and I am flushing money down the drain. There are exceptions. But I will not blindly keep making MFSL purchases, and hope that the planets will align, so that "this time", it will sound great.
Paul has some great products, and some not great products. But he touts them all as great. I can’t blame him. It boosts his sales. His Direct Stream DAC is very good. So that is a good choice. But Paul’s videos are a bit of a Mr. Rogers act, where he portrays himself as 100% trustworthy. He leaves out key details in his discussions. I trust him, but not fully. I verify anything that he says, as he sometimes plays fast and loose with the truth. I have heard from a high-end store’s owner that Paul has not supported warranty claims from his power plant products, and has undercut his own dealers on pricing. So some dealers have dropped his products. Customers have contacted Paul (or his staff), and said "I can purchase [fill in item] from [fill in store] at [fill in price]. And then PS Audio’s personnel give the customer a lower price, and the dealer, who has the item in stock, can’t sell it. A few months ago (November of 2025), PS Audio was a vendor at a New Jersey show. They had two rooms. One was too crowded to enter (I was told that Paul was in there, and that the FR5 speakers were in there). The other room, directly across the hall, had the FR20 speakers, and power plants, and the rest. I have photos, if you or anyone want to see them. That was the first and only time that I ever heard any PS Audio equipment. That system sounded sterile. But in all fairness, only two vendor’s stereos, at that show, sounded very good. And many of the vendors had huge spaces, and still sounded not so good. It was a hotel. So that is hard to overcome. The FR20s were in a hotel room. So there is that to consider. But Paul wrote books on system set-up. He had to know what his system would sound like in a hotel room. I visited every room (other than the crowded FR5 room). Only two stereos had impressive sound quality. One of them was Audio Note. I do not remember the other one. So PS Audio was not the only vendor with sound quality problems at that show.
True. But it works both ways. There are seemingly endless levels of wonderful. Just when you think that you have heard digital that beats vinyl, you then hear vinyl that beats digital. And the vinyl rig will make a big difference. Use a Lyra Atlas cartridge, with a custom brass shim, and a Kuzma Safir 9 Tonearm, personally dialed in by WAMM Engineering’s J.R. Boisclair, feeding an Aesthetix IO Eclipse phono-amp, and the best DSD will have its work cut out to unseat that rig. And it will, and it will not. It will depend on the quality of the DSD content, and the quality of the vinyl pressing. Note that DSD was probably converted to PCM, to do mixing and mastering, and then converted back to DSD. So would that song have sounded just as good, if left in its PCM format, and fed to a DAC via I²S (or via AES/EBU, which delivers the same I²S data in a standardized package)? |
Here in 8 minutes the reasons why some keep turntable and others ditch them : One Groove. Two Channels. Vinyl Under an Electron Microscopehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4yPl2ZP_GE
I will only add that digital control of high level dynamics exist and speaker/room acoustics matter more than good Turntable/ good dac choice ... We had a choice and any choice imply a trade-off ...
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