February 2026
Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab / Columbia Records—MFSL 2-567
Format: LP
Musical Performance
Sound Quality
Overall Enjoyment
I hadn’t bought a Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab LP since the 2022 dustup over the sources the label was using for its costly reissues. MoFi’s handling of the issue was imperfect, but in the end, it reached a settlement with disgruntled customers. At this point, the big takeaway from all the noise the scandal created is that it’s silly to assume an original analog tape is the best and only source for cutting an LP.
As I said, though, I hadn’t bought a MoFi release in three years, simply because nothing caught my eye. The label seemed to be reissuing titles I already had. I have a MoFi pressing of Miles Davis’s Milestones, for instance, and I’m not buying it again just because MoFi releases it on a newer, even quieter vinyl compound.
However, when I saw in June that MoFi was going to release Davis’s Agharta, I immediately preordered it. I had been waiting for a vinyl reissue of this album for some time. The two-LP set, originally released in Japan and Europe in 1975 and then in the US a year later, has been through several mastering variations. The American LP release from 1976 is, by most accounts, muddier and more aggressive-sounding than the Japanese version from a year earlier.
As much as I had wanted a vinyl copy of the album, I couldn’t justify the cost of a Japanese pressing. Copies of the US release are also expensive, and they seem especially so given their bad sonic reputation.
Columbia Records released a CD version of the album in 1991, remastered once again. I have that 1991 CD (Columbia C2K 46799), and it will be my point of comparison for this new vinyl reissue.
Almost all of Davis’s recordings after 1969’s In a Silent Way were controversial, and to some extent they remain so. Too much compromise towards rock music, critics asserted. But In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew (1970), Jack Johnson (1971), and Live-Evil (1971) were also polyrhythmic, polytonal, and often difficult.
Agharta flowed out of the musical experiments Davis had started with On the Corner in 1972. He stripped his music down to its rhythmic essentials, taking some cues from James Brown and Sly Stone, but creating music that was much darker in tone. Davis seemed to have absorbed Sly’s messages of racial tension and anger in There’s a Riot Goin’ On and carried them even further.
Davis toured heavily over the next several years following the release of On the Corner, backed by a band he had assembled and refined. He played two shows in Osaka, Japan, in February 1975, which CBS/Sony in Japan recorded. Agharta consisted of the afternoon show; Pangaea, released in 1976, came from the evening performances.
The music played in those shows was densely packed. I thought the CD did a reasonable job of presenting all the instruments on the opening track, “Prelude.” A series of low notes on a keyboard—probably Davis on organ—help bring in drummer Al Foster and percussionist Mtume. They are quickly joined by guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lewis, then bassist Michael Henderson. Davis plays a bright, splashing chord on the organ a few seconds in.
The LP opens the music up dramatically. Lewis’s wah-wah-driven chords in the right channel are fuller and more layered, with a better rendering of the chords’ low notes. Cosey’s single-note lines in response in the left channel are firmer and much more audible. They are faint and reserved on the CD. Foster’s cymbals are brighter and splashier, and his snare is more resonant on this reissue. Henderson’s bass lines are more driving and thunderous, and more rhythmically insistent. The music sounds crammed and flat on the CD by comparison.
Davis begins to play trumpet two minutes in. At that point in his career, he was attaching a pickup to the instrument and using a wah-wah pedal to create new sounds. On this pressing, his trumpet is better separated and more out in front of the other instruments during his solo, and as a consequence it’s easier to hear his tone and his ideas as they unfold. Other details in the recording also register more soundly. Mtume’s congas are more clearly presented, and other percussion in both channels jumps out and catches your ear.
Sonny Fortune’s saxophone solo also benefits from this new master. It sounds more tonally accurate, and Fortune’s quick runs don’t get lost in the murk. On the CD, Cosey’s guitar solo is firmly in the left channel, while on the new pressing it echoes into the right. It also has more texture and menace on the MoFi release. Lucas’s rhythm guitar is much more audible in the right channel now, even as Cosey’s guitar echoes around him.
I’m spending so much time with “Prelude” because it takes up all of side 1 and a good portion of side 2. The second LP is taken up by “Interlude” on side 1 and “Theme from Jack Johnson” on side 2. Both tracks contain references to some of the music on Jack Johnson, and it’s clear that they really comprise a single musical piece here, which at 52 minutes had to be split over two sides.
On the CD the music rushes at you full-on, while the new LP lets each instrument register. Conga drums on “Interlude” ring out fully, Fortune’s saxophone lines have more space to sustain and then fade, and Taylor’s drum accents are more audible, while his cymbal work, which gets lost in the tightly packed sound on the CD, reaches out to enrich and fill out the arrangements. Davis’s trumpet is warmer, and the small shifts in tone he gets from the wah-wah pedal are much easier to follow.
Henderson’s bass lines on both tracks have more body and a firmer low-end rumble on the new remaster. Lucas’s rhythm-guitar parts are more clearly etched now, and it’s clear that his playing ties the music together, even in the most hectic sections. His solo on “Theme from Jack Johnson” has much more power on this LP because the individual notes cut through with more force. Keyboard and percussion effects are cleaner and more focused as well.
The mastering of this MoFi reissue is credited to “Krieg Wunderlich, assisted by Shawn R. Britton.” The label lists the mastering chain on the back cover: “¼″ / 15 IPS analog master; DSD 256; analog console; lathe.” Fidelity Record Pressing, a plant developed and built by MoFi in the last few years, pressed the two LPs. My copy was absolutely quiet, flat, and correctly centered. The plant is clearly aiming to achieve the kind of high-quality LP pressings for which RTI, QRP, and Pallas are noted.
Agharta is heavy on atmosphere, and the mastering on the MoFi reissue brings out so much more detail and allows instruments so much more space that I was hearing subtle interactions between the players for the first time. Sections that sound chaotic and noisy on the CD now sound more organized. I heard shifts by individual players that caused the rest of the band to fall in behind and move the music in another direction.
Wunderlich and Britton haven’t softened the impact of Agharta. The music on the album is dark, busy, and, at times, confrontational. There are also passages of great beauty. MoFi’s reissue of the album shows the performances on Agharta to be the work of a band and its leader in fine, aggressive form.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
