Afaict the cool thing about MoFi pressings (at least, ones from back in the day) is they were done at half speed. So, when the lacquer is cut from the master tape, they'd do it at half playback speed rather than full playback speed, which allowed the physical cutting head to track the high frequencies more accurately. I can say that this absolutely does make a difference during playback; my MoFi copy of Aja sounds very good (almost as good as the digital version!).
That said, vinyl is effectively an obsolete medium. I say this as someone who owns upwards of 1k vinyl records. I buy them because many recordings remain inaccessible or very challenging to find digitally. But I would never buy a newly released album on vinyl over digital if I had the choice and if both were using the same master.
Biggest one was country. Lots of impossible to find stuff from the 50s thru the 70s. I'd learn about it by digging at the record shop near where I went to college. There's not much of an audience for it anymore, so the labels have no incentive to dig through their catalogs.
In a completely different direction, 80s Japanese pop (city pop). I would listen to compilations, look up my favorite tracks on discogs to find the album it came from, and then... No dice. Often they're available on both CD and vinyl, but the vinyl version is often cheaper (because they made more original pressings than CD reissues). Sometimes they never get reissued on CD and vinyl is the only option.
Last case is dance music, which comes in 12" singles rather than albums. To find that stuff, I used to go to a used junk store that devoted its entire basement to records. Again, a lot of 80s and even 90s material never made it to digital.
Thank you so much for your response! This is fascinating to me (I'm really into stuff like city pop and dance music), and makes me really sad that there's only a tiny overpriced market for vinyl where I live, really no place where I can go and 'dig through bins' to find gems :(
You're welcome! And yeah, City Pop is really annoying to collect. I used to go to BOOKOFF in Manhattan where they had a huge selection of $2 Japanese CDs, but they totally removed that section several years ago. Almost impossible to find now except online or in Japan. Well, there's a massive City Pop record store in Brooklyn but the prices are insane. Most records upwards of $50.
Thank you so much for your response! This is fascinating to me, and makes me really sad that there's only a tiny overpriced market for vinyl where I live, really no place where I can go and 'dig through bins' to find gems :(
That said, vinyl is effectively an obsolete medium. I say this as someone who owns upwards of 1k vinyl records. I buy them because many recordings remain inaccessible or very challenging to find digitally. But I would never buy a newly released album on vinyl over digital if I had the choice and if both were using the same master.