The discs sat in my collection, surpassed as favorites by the 1997 remasters, until a few years ago when I was trying to conserve space and moved them. And then kind of forgot about them. Oh, I saw them sitting up there, on top of my big CD racks, but I never grabbed them to listen to. I had already made up my mind - the remasters sounded great, why bother?

The dorky completist fan in me made me salivate over the thought of this new MoFi Permanent Waves. For whatever reason, those long-ignored gold discs on my shelf suddenly grabbed my interest again. In the days before my order arrived, I pulled those discs down and gave them a listen. Audio nirvana - all those years listening to the remasters that I thought superior was erased by the calming, soothing, beautiful mastering of the Mobile Fidelity issues. I couldn't believe my ears. I jumped back and forth between the remasters and the MoFi discs, and, in the case of Moving Pictures, the original, unremastered CD. Things were different, very different - everything sounded better, clearer, brighter, cleaner . . . the soundstage is wider and more relaxed. Most of all, they were a pure joy to listen to. There's that weird thing I like to call "room sound." Some people I talk to know what I'm talking about, others don't. The MoFi discs reveal the room in which the instruments were recorded - one can sense the walls and space around them, especially Neil Peart's drums, which practically sound alive.

Permanent Waveshas arrived (stamped with #00398 in gold lettering - sweet!) and has gone through the same process - A/B-ing with the 1997 remaster - and the conclusion is the same. The latest Mobile Fidelity offering will not, however, find itself forgotten like the other Rush MoFi releases did. Nor will the previous three - they have found a permanent home on my Ipod, ripped in Apple Lossless format for the highest sound quality possible on that iconic little box. And what aobut you? The right listener, the picky listener, especially the Rush fan audiophile, on the right equipment, is going to have a second Christmas.