Ok, for those who like music from the 70s, this article may be of interest to you;
"Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MFSL) is a California-based company that specializes in high quality reissues of key, often highly successful, popular albums. MFSL was still in business until 1999.
MFSL began issuing albums in 1977, during the height of the dissatisfaction over the sound of (mainly US) pressings of albums. Most of the decade had been spent by collectors decrying how poor the album pressings had become in the 1970s. There were several reasons contributing to this sense that sound quality had gone downhill.
First, collectors noticed that the Japanese pressings, and in many cases the UK pressings, of albums were quieter than US pressings. This was mainly due to better vinyl quality. Many US albums at the time were pressed using recycled vinyl to some extent, as opposed to "virgin vinyl" which had never been recycled. Second, many of the highly successful albums were being mastered from "master tapes" which were second, third, or higher generation copies of the mixdown masters, not the original mixdown masters themselves. Third, mass production in the 1970s, especially in the US where record sales were at an almost undreamed-of height, had certainly resulted in a drop in quality control. Defects such as warpage were much more common than had previously been tolerated.
MFSL tried to answer these problems in the marketplace with a high-quality reissue that, although priced at about double the price of a standard album, would appeal to those buyers who were quality-conscious about the factors which led to high sound quality. From MFSL's catalogs, the way they put it was as follows:
What distinguishes an Original master Recording LP from any other record?
1. Original Master Recordings are exclusively transferred from the original stereo master tape that the musicians recorded in the studio (not from a second, third, or fourth generation copy of that master tape).
2. Each Original Master Recording employs Mobile Fidelity Sound lab's exclusive half-speed mastering process, thus capturing every nuance of sound from the master tape.
3. Quality, not quantity, is the overwhelming consideration in the creation of each Original Master Recording. The number of pressings is strictly controlled. These limited editions assure you that the quality of the last pressing matches the quality of the first.
4. Original Master recordings are custom pressed overseas by the Victor Company of Japan (JVC). Super Vinyl, an exclusive compound far superior to even so-called 100% virgin vinyl, is utilized to achieve maximum clarity and startling quietness.... Super Vinyl also bestows unsurpassed durability to each Original Master Recording LP, achieving a "playing lifespan" at least five times longer than mass- produced records.
5. Each Original Master Recording is ultra-packaged to maintain flatness and prevent warpage.
MFSL became well known for quality vinyl pressings. With the advent of compact discs in the mid- 1980s, MFSL moved to the issue of "high quality compact discs," many with a gold strike on the disc as opposed to the aluminum surface of regular discs. The "gold disc" was meant to answer another of the concerns of audiophiles, this time the new CD buyers. Rumors in the mid-1980s had it that the lifetime of a normal CD may be as short as 10 years before the aluminum oxidized and the disc became unplayable. This has widely been discredited as a theory, and most people in the business now view regular, defect-free, CDs as potentially lasting decades to centuries.
Nevertheless, the MFSL "gold disc" led the way for many of the other record companies to issue their own "gold discs." Although MFSL seemed to be a stickler for noise reduction, many of the other "gold discs" had little to recommend them over their regular counterparts other than the snobbishness of a higher list price and a gold color. Both Sides Now has done listening tests on various "gold discs" over the years, with the conclusion that the sound quality difference with CDs is much more related to the quality of the master tape than anything else, and in many cases the exact same master tape is used for regular and "gold discs." In any case, the difference that an MFSL compact disc makes, due to the current technology being what it is, is less than the difference that a MFSL vinyl record made when vinyl was king.
Mobile Fidelity went bankrupt in 1999."
So when looking for LPs from the 70's...best to look for UK or Japanese pressings...instead of US pressing, unless it is under the MFSL label, but then the MFSL albums are rare and expensive. By the way, the article above is old...MFSL is back in business.
