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US record manufacturer Mobile Fidelity in vinyl mastering controversy

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On 6 August, Geoff Edgers of The Washington Post reported "how a Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire". He revealed that, on 14 July, Mike Esposito of The 'In' Groove record shop appeared on his regular YouTube channel spot and declared that he had "pretty reliable sources" at one of the country's premier vinyl-makers, Mobile Fidelity, of Sebastopol, California, who admitted to him that some of their One-Step series of releases used not only analogue mastertape, but also digital sources.

Except to certain audiophiles, this 'revelation' shouldn't come as too much of a shock, as digital techniques have been used by numerous vinyl-makers for convenience, and to bolster audio sound quality when required, for years. However, as you'd expect when two or more analogue-versus-digital champions square off, an online hoo-ha erupted, and MoFi's executive Vice-President, John Wood, invited Esposito to visit the MoFi facility for himself. The record shop owner did just that on 19 July and, after speaking to three in-house engineers there, he posted another YouTube report on the day after his trip, confirming that his suspicions were, indeed, correct. Mobile Fidelity had been using Direct Stream Digital processing since 2011, to improve the audio of many of its releases. Its faux pas was not to own up to the fact in its literature or advertising for its industry-standard Original Master Recording releases. The company's chief marketing officer, Syd Schwartz, admitted that "there had been choices made over the years, and choices in marketing, that have led to confusion and anger, and a lot of questions, and there were narratives that had been propagating for a while that were untrue, or false, or myths. We were wrong not to have addressed this sooner," thus pre-empting potential US legal actions.