Quality of New MoFi recordings

I agree with Jaybo and Mofimadness. And I too was going to mention how great the Natalie Merchant album is!

The very first series of MoFi remasteres - note that, for the the most part, other than trains and thunderstorms, MoFi never made recordings, remasterings and pressings is more like it - were mastered by the great Stan Ricker and are complete standouts. Subsequently Gary Giorgi started mastering the reissues and his masterings were boosted in the bass and treble, the so called "smiley face" equilization. The horrible "Aja" is a good example of this and highly available, but there were lots of them. People react to this tinkering quite differently, some like it, and some do not. IMHO it is an abomination.

The very limited UHQR recordings are probably the best reissues ever produced and command prices commensurate with their extreme level of achievement.

The second coming of MoFi, since they were aquired by Music Direct has produced excellent recordings as well. They probably have a good future ahead of them.

The knock on MoFi has always been the, rather strange, titles that were selected for remastering. In the old days we shook our heads at some choices like Bernie Kruss' "Citidels of Mystery" and Steeleye Spann's "All Around My Hat". This seems to continue even today. Though they are fine recordings, of all the available recordings, why the Marc Cohn album? Even the Richard Thompson and Aimee Mann outings seem strange condidering all of the available possibilities.

Viridian, you have hit the nail on the head. I too have shook my head at alot of the selections from MOFI. I am not sure who does the selecting of such albums but I think we need some new thinking....

UNless I miss my guess, some of the reason behind the eclectic "repertoire" if you will, was the ability to obtain the rights to high quality analog masters. I could be wrong, but that's my guess.

Swampwalker is exactly right.