I say this with only a slight bit of embarrassment; The Cars’ debut album is my most-purchased title ever. I received it on vinyl one Christmas (way back when humans licked scum off the rocks for sustenance… 1978?), wore that out, repurchased it a year later, bought the CD at the dawn of the digital era, rebought the Rhino remaster because that initial release was horrid, and finally it has come to this — the Mobile Fidelity half-speed mastered vinyl edition. Can you imagine?

For those who like to geek out on the technical end of things, in the vinyl world a sound source is fed into the machine that lathe-cuts the groove into the metal master disc. It is this disc that subsequent vinyl imprints will be pressed from. For modern vinyl cutting, that source is a digital file and the cutting is in real time, meaning the lathe cuts at the same rate as the song is normally played. Mobile Fidelity, or Mo-Fi as they’ve branded themselves, goes back to the original analog master tape for source material and plays back the tracks at half the speed, thus being able to grab much more audio material, hence the “Half Speed Mastered” headline so famously pasted across the tops of their sleeves.

Does it make a difference? I begrudgingly have to admit that it does, and I say this because I am famously candid on the point that my love for vinyl is strictly irrational. I believe it is equal parts nostalgia, fetish and perhaps an attraction to the “bigness” of the record presentation, and that most of the time the much mentioned “warmth” and clarity of analog is the listener hearing what they want to hear, but not what really is. Yet those first palm-muted guitar plunks of “Good Times Roll” followed by the keyboard pings from Greg Hawkes definitely have something my remastered CD doesn’t, and the creeping fear that I’m becoming another arrogant audiophile has started to settle in. (more…)