Tuttle et al v Audiophile Music Direct

[PeterG]

1 hour ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

I suppose the lawsuit will determine how "dishonest" they were.  The gullibility of consumers is also in play here.

Stuff like this does not go to trial.  It will settle with MoFi offering returns and/or store credits, plus legal fees.

 

But really...if they offered full refunds if original purchasers shipped vinyl back, would many take it?  Unlikely--these are magnificent albums in both music and sound quality.  Your replacement copy of Kind of Blue will not sound as good

[PeterG]

1 hour ago, sphinxsix said:

+1 Didn't read it earlier. Seems that MoFi itself didn't regard their customers objections as ..unreasonable :-)

 

 

Or they are calling the complainers' bluff 😉

 

Still waiting to hear a person say they've found better sounding vinyl...

[PeterG]

21 minutes ago, JoeWhip said:

I posted this elsewhere but thought it appropriate to post it here as well. My view on the viability of a class action lawsuit against MoFi.

 

I will have to read the complaint, but as a retired trial lawyer who worked cases in federal court and one in the Supreme Court, there are many issues here. The biggest is class certification because without it, I do not see these two lead plaintiffs meeting the $75,000 threshold for diversity, even considering the possibility of punitive damages. With the claims based on state law, I could see a federal judge interpreting things narrowly and kicking the case out To be dealt with at the state court level. I have known a couple federal judges who would be loathe to have this type of case in the federal system, with state court remedies available. Without class certification, I just do not see this case staying in federal court. Then you have the issue of fraud and damages. Now consumer protection laws are not my area of expertise, but is the undisclosed digital step amount to legal fraud? You are still buying a record in all likelihood a great sounding one. If it can be proven that the DSD transfer is transparent to the master, what is the injury? For people who buy these one steps in part as an investment vs. actual use, that may be a bit too speculative for the court to consider. I am not even sure that the purposes of these laws is to protect that interest. Finally, my experience with class action lawsuits is that the only winners are the lawyers, on both sides. The actual plaintiffs get very little. Given all these considerations, would audiophiles like to see MoFi and Music Direct driven out of business so that a few lawyers get to make a killing? For these reasons, I do not really see this case going anywhere. But, I could be wrong.

 

Thanks, counselor.  Another question for Judge Joe--if a mint MoFi album sells for more on Discogs today than customers paid when the album was released, were customers harmed?

[PeterG]

4 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Chris, before I antagonize you, Mobile Fidelity’s situation is like the craft whiskey surprise in 2014. When the Daily Beast broke the story “Your “craft” Whiskey is Probably from a Factory Distillery in Indiana.”

 

Let’s review courtesy of the Orange Bean April 15, 2021. “These businesses, often craft whiskey brewers, may or may not mention MGP. Typically, they create an origin tale about their great-grandfather’s rye whiskey recipe. It’s a marketing ploy, of course, designed to hide the fact that the delectable brew inside the bottle actually hails from a large-scale operation that’s just very good at what it does: making whiskey. In fact, MGP has earned numerous awards for its whiskey.

 

MGP also makes whiskey for large brands such as Diageo, which is headquartered in London and is one of the world’s largest whiskey sellers. Diageo sells many spirits and they’re not especially keen on sharing which products feature MGP ingredients. You might be wondering, is this even legal? Can you make up an origin story about your Uncle Joe’s Appalachian moonshine still, knowing full well that your whiskey comes from a big distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana?

 

Actually, yes, it appears to be legal. In the U.S., bottlers of whiskey frequently source their whiskey from one of the country’s few large distilleries.”

 

I struggle to see any difference. MOFI is trying to make the best recording they can. Nobody has said their process is producing an inferior recording before the disclosures. Good evidence of this is nobody noticed for more than ten years.

Exactly.  Only a dope would enjoy whiskey for its origin rather than its taste--the proof of the pudding is in the eating. 

[PeterG]

2 hours ago, firedog said:

Yeah you can: the right VSP plugins and DSP and/or a tube pre. Or a digital tube emulator.

 

I can even add the various noises that turntables and record playback adds to music reproduction. Actual turntable sounds, digitized. Makes your clean digital file sound like it's being played from an LP:

Adds surface noise, tracking noise, etc. Or the distortion added by the analog desks from Abbey Road.

I can even pops and clicks if you want them. 

All the glories of LP inaccuracy.

Sounds just like the old days.

I'm not joking.

 

Yes, this is a great point.  When we think about the sonics of vinyl, we typically think about a brand new, super clean LP on a very expensive turntable.  But these ideal conditions are very difficult, perhaps impossible to maintain--LPs do not remain brand new, especially well-loved LPs

[PeterG]

2 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

People spent a billion dollars on digitally-sourced vinyl last year?  Madness!

Much of what my kids enjoy about vinyl is the physical media/sensation.  That's completely understandable

[PeterG]

9 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Back when I tried Tidal and MQA, there were MQA albums whose sound I didn't mind (others I very much did). Should that have prevented me from feeling that the albums I didn't mind might well have been even better without the MQA process?

 

The point is that though these folks thought the MoFi albums sounded good, that doesn't preclude them from feeling they would have liked the sound of those albums more had they not gone through a digital step.  (Since it's rather difficult to make analog copies audibly indistinguishable from the originals, it's hard to argue those albums would not have sounded different, and perhaps more to these listeners' preference, with an analog step substituted for the digital one.)

 

You seem to be arguing that we should be able tp chose each recording's attributes from a cafeteria menu?   

 

 

[PeterG]

I often buy CDs just on seeing they have been reviewed.  This was the case a month or so ago when I saw Mark Smotroff's July 6 (pre-MoFi news) Audiophile Review coverage of Ella Fitzgerald at the Hollywood Bowl.  I was disappointed with the sonics (maybe I should read the reviews? haha), so returned to the review just now.  HA!  It includes a pragmatic discussion of all the issues here--how tech and media issues interact with sonics, how these things are described to listeners, and how to put that into a buying decision context.  Hat's off to Mr Smotroff, he anticipated the whole thing:

 

Sonics wise, Ella At The Hollywood Bowl sounds very good all things considered — it is after all a 60-plus year old analog tape captured from the soundboard, recorded live without a net. I enjoyed listening to it on vinyl a bit more than I did the high resolution 96 kHz, 24-bit stream on Qobuz (click here) which sounded a bit bright. So the vinyl presentation helps to warm things up — a little bit. Curiously, the album was not completely available yet on Tidal but the couple of songs that are there (click here) sounded a bit less bright (if you will), streaming at 48 kHz, 24-bit resolution.  It is also streaming on Apple Music (click here for Hi Res Lossless).

I do suspect this original tape source was digitally remastered for this release. In the album liner notes, a company called Izotope — which manufactures digital audio workstation type software — is credited. I don’t view this as necessarily bad but the result is a more modern sounding release than one might expect from a 1958 live concert captured on analog reel-to-reel tape. This production style is probably a 21st century necessity if this recording was to have any chance at a life on the Internet as well as modern day radio and TV applications. So, analog purists do set your expectations accordingly.

In the world of Grateful Dead tape traders, this is what people used to call “a crisp soundboard.” 

[PeterG]

46 minutes ago, JoeWhip said:

Being from Philly I cannot believe I will defend NYC, but man, have I seen some great jazz musicians there over the years!

Yes--probably the greatest place in the world to be a jazz fun.  I've made 30-40 one night trips on randomly selected nights, and never failed to find a good show

 

[PeterG]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

My guess is the dog caught the car, for the most part. Now what. Many have the best sounding albums in their collections and they'll want to return those? Makes little sense.

 

Agreed--virtually all will take the 10% coupon...

 

For those who have not tried UHQR on an album they love because it is expensive, a PIA to flip a 45 every two songs, ridiculously packaged, and you have a great CD already--I agree!  It is all those things.  But they can also be completely next level in terms of sonics--wider and deeper soundstage, fuller and more textured bass, better decay and other details, but in a completely natural non-analytical way.  Nobody who owns these is going to give them up.

 

Like most small dollar class action lawsuits, only the lawyers benefit here

 

[PeterG]

3 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

There is no consensus that an all-analog chain of reproducing a record has superior sound or is better quality than a chain with digital steps.

 

This is an interesting notion.  There is consensus among typical One Step buyers and journalists that all analog is ideal.  But the best experts on this issue would be drawn from the extremely small group of people employed by MoFi and similar companies to engineer high end vinyl reissues...the people who have added the digital steps!

[PeterG]

19 minutes ago, Jud said:

Not quite sure why there is such a desire to save folks from themselves. These people were told they were buying one thing, it wasn’t what they were told, they want their money back. It’s not complicated.

 

Two things make it complicated and interesting:

 

First, by virtually all accounts, One-Steps sound AWESOME.  The real value was delivered.  We could debate whether they could be even better, but since most of them are the best edition ever available of their title...

 

Second, in part based on the above, and in part due to limited supply, One-Steps generally (always?) increase in value.

 

So we have a group of "wronged" buyers who love what they've bought, and what they've bought is now worth more than what they paid.  Yet they are still aggrieved.  

 

I only wish one of the plaintiffs would let me buy their lightly-used One-Steps for MSRP

[PeterG]

1 minute ago, Jud said:

Because you want to listen to the analog recording you thought you bought?

 

As I implied above, that 100% analog recording does not exist, has never existed...

[PeterG]

3 hours ago, Jud said:

If they want to listen rather than collect, I’m not sure what problem you’re finding when what they were sent isn’t what they wanted to listen to.

 

I'm also not seeing the relevance of the fact that these LPs, though they aren't what consumers wanted to listen to, would be valued by collectors who don't want to listen to them, just have them sit on shelves in plastic wrap and warp. (I knew a record collector. Shelves full of unplayed and eventually warped and unplayable records still unwrapped whose prices he checked on Goldmine. Struck me as a quite asinine hobby.)

 

I don't mean to poke at you personally, but you seem to keep ignoring a huge fundamental issue.  Have you heard a One-Step?  They sound divine, they are what their buyers want to listen to.  I cannot speak to one anonymous example, but the secondary market in general is largely used records with visible wear. 

 

If you have not heard one, try to friend a friend who is nutty enough to drop $150 or so on an LP, and ENJOY!  (You'll quickly hear why very few One-Step owners will be returning their discs.)

[PeterG]

58 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Well, I was only a lawyer for 42 years, so I may not have this just right, but if someone sued an entity I worked for and could not provide any proof of damages, guess what they'd have gotten in return? A motion for summary judgment, since proof of damages is fundamental to continuing to assert a claim.

 

So what actually happened is that plaintiffs convinced MoFi they could at least make a reasonable attempt at submitting evidence of damages if the case went to trial.  As @Allan F mentioned, such proof would likely not be easy (I know how I'd try to do it, and probably the plaintiffs outlined something similar to MoFi), so in view of that the current plaintiffs were willing to settle for what seems to be a very reasonable outcome.

 

I have no legal experience, so please grant just a bit of leeway.  The agreement you cited--return/5% refund/10% credit--is essentially summary judgement from an economic perspective, in a case where (if I am correct about buyers loving the sound of One-Steps) virtually nobody is going to return, and the vast majority will take the 10% credit.  While I suppose summary judgement has zero costs once it's issued, the super-low cost agreement saves on legal fees and helps a difficult PR situation.  So maybe the agreement is actually lower total costs?