More of the Music of Bob Dylan
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Bob Dylan
Flat as a pancake and dead as a doornail, sounding like most of the Sundazed records we used to play all those years ago (and, shamefully, we even sold a few of their titles too).
Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.
Sundazed is clearly a label that should be avoided by audiophiles looking for high quality sound. Their incompetent remastering hack work on Blonde on Blonde is just more evidence to back up our low opinion of them.
There is an abundance of audiophile collector hype surrounding the hundreds of Heavy Vinyl pressings currently in print. I read a lot about how wonderful their sound is, but when I actually play them, I rarely find them to be any better than mediocre, and many of them are downright awful.
Music Matters made this garbage remaster. Did anyone notice how awful it sounded? I could list a hundred more that range from bad to worse — and I have!
Audiophiles seem to have approached these records naively instead of skeptically.
(But wait a minute. Who am I to talk? I did the same thing when I first got into audio and was avidly collecting records in the Seventies.)
How could so many be fooled so badly? You would think that some of these people have good enough equipment to allow them to hear how substandard these records sound.
Apparently that is not the case. The embrace of one third-rate Heavy Vinyl pressing after another by the audiophile community has rendered absurd the pretense that their members ever developed anything beyond the most rudimentary critical listening skills, with stereo systems that are much better at hiding the faults of these records than revealing them.
Sadly, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the best explanation for the sorry state of audio these days, means they simply don’t know how little they know, and therefore see no reason to doubt their high opinions of their equipment and their audio acumen.
Progress in audio is possible, but only if you know that you are not already at the top of the mountain. For the vast majority of audiophiles, a lot of serious climbing remains to be done — but only if you want to hear your records right.