Top Artists – Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – Our Favorite from His Early Days

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is clearly our favorite of the early Dylan albums for both music and sound. We’re picking up both mono and stereo copies when we see them clean (which is rare) and both the mono mix and the stereo mix can sound out of this world.

Hearing these great songs sound so intimate and lifelike on a top-quality pressing can be a sublime experience. We should know; we enjoyed the hell out of this very copy.

The best sides are amazingly spacious, full-bodied, natural and clear with great presence.

It’s clear these classic songs have stood the test of time: Blowin’ in the Wind; Girl from the North Country; Masters of War; A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall; Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and many more. A Folk Classic from 1963 that should appeal to any fan of early Dylan.

Did I mention all the great songs?

  • Blowin’ in the Wind
  • Girl from the North Country
  • Masters of War
  • A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
  • Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
  • Bob Dylan’s Dream
  • Talking World War III Blues

… and five more

These modern classics make this Dylan album, his second, clearly the strongest of his first four. You have to wait for his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, to find material this consistently brilliant and groundbreaking.

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Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks

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  • With solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER on both sides, this is an outstanding Blood on the Tracks from start to finish
  • For tonally-correct, un-hyped acoustic guitars and vocals, the sound of this album is tough to beat in Dylan’s catalog
  • The better copies are rich, warm, tubey and full-bodied – in other words, they are exactly what’s good about the vintage analog pressings we offer to the discriminating audiophiles who appreciates the difference
  • 5 stars: “…it’s an affecting, unbearably poignant record, not because it’s a glimpse into his soul, but because the songs are remarkably clear-eyed and sentimental, lovely and melancholy at once. Dylan made albums more influential than this, but he never made one better.”

This is an outstanding recording but it takes a special pressing to bring it to life. It’s nice when the copy in hand has all the transparency, space, layered depth and three-dimensionality that makes listening to records such a fundamentally different experience than listening to digitally-sourced material, but it’s not nearly as important as having a rich, relaxed quality. A touch of smear and a slight lack of resolution is not the end of the world on this album. Brightness, along with too much grain and grit, can be.

This was a “comeback” album for Dylan, one that completely reinvigorated his following in the mid-’70s. No recording of his with which we are familiar since then can compare to this one. Recording technology has gone backward at full speed, and, to be charitable, his voice has not exactly improved with time either. Drenching his voice in reverb on albums like Time Out of Mind makes his raspy croak sound worse, not better. (more…)

Another Side of Bob Dylan – Sundazed Mono Reviewed

More of the Music of Bob Dylan

More of Sundazed’s (Mostly Bad Sounding) Records

Sonic Grade: D

Another bad Sundazed record. Most of the Dylan catalog they did is just awful, regardless of what the audiophile reviewers at the time may have written to the contrary. 

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Bob Dylan Listening Test – Here’s One to Wet Your Whistle

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now

Presenting today’s Home Audio Exercise. Play your copy of Nashville Skyline — on speakers, no fair cheating on headphones! — and see if you can answer this question. At the beginning of one of the songs on this album two sounds are heard, neither of which is produced by an instrument, but could be said to have been produced by a singer. What are these two mysterious sounds?  

If you have a good copy of the record, a good stereo and the ability to listen critically, you should have no problem figuring out what these sounds are. When you do, drop us an email. Until we come up with a better prize, for now we can offer you an extra 10% off your next order.

Have fun. Once you hear it you will be pretty amazed that you never noticed it before. We sure were.

What’s most striking about this album is the sound of Johnny Cash’s voice in the duet he sings with Bob (we’re on a first name basis, don’t you know). I can’t remember when’s the last time I heard Johnny Cash sound better.

The stuff he did for American Recordings had much to recommend it; the first album sounded especially good. It was practically Mono.

But you just can’t beat a well produced, well engineered Columbia from this era. There’s a richness and a naturalness to the sound that has almost completely disappeared from the modern world of music.

You really do have to go back to these old originals to find it. And then you have to find just the right old originals for it to be there.

Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?

Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.

This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:

Bob Dylan / Hard Rain

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  • An outstanding vintage stereo pressing of Dylan’s live 1976 release with solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • This copy is hard to fault – big, open, clear, with space and three-dimensionality that modern pressings can only dream of
  • “At times, Hard Rain sounds bloated, featuring performances that are sometimes too ragged; though knowing the subtext of the events, some moments feel triumphant: musical and personal. We may not know Bob Dylan, but it’s an awfully close look at a stranger.” – Magnet Magazine

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Bob Dylan – Oh Mercy

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  • This pressing boasts very goodsound from the first note to last
  • These sides were doing just about everything right – they’re clean, clear and spacious with weight down low and strong vocal presence
  • “Oh Mercy was hailed as a comeback, not just because it had songs noticeably more meaningful than anything Bob Dylan had recently released, but because Daniel Lanois’ production gave it cohesion… at the time, this production made it seem like the equivalent of his ’60s records, meaning that its artiness was cutting edge, not portentous…”

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Bob Dylan / Bringing It All Back Home on the ’70s Red Label

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  • This Red Label ’70s reissue pressing boasts very good Hot Stamper sound on both sides
  • These pressings can be quite good – lively, transparent, and fairly rich, with dramatically more immediacy in the midrange than anything pressed in the modern era
  • 5 stars: “With Bringing It All Back Home, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it’s not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Outlaw Blues”; it’s that he’s exploding with imagination throughout the record.”

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Bob Dylan – Self Portrait

  • A superb copy of Dylan’s 1970 release with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER from first note to last
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness and presence on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true for whatever godawful Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently being foisted on an unsuspecting record-buying public
  • “… it’s a fun, affectionate, sometimes beautiful, often entertaining, occasionally goofy record. As a tangle of roots and enthusiasms, it looks forward to Dylan’s two early-90s albums of folk-song covers, to his eclectic satellite-radio show, which ran on Sirius from 2006 to 2009, and to his recent string of albums with their timeless-sounding fusion of blues, country, folk, and pop.” – Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair

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Traveling Wilburys – Vol. 3

  • Insanely good sound throughout with both sides earning nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) grades; the first copy to ever hit the site!  
  • Both of these sides had some of the best sound in our recent shootout — big, full-bodied and present with a massive bottom end and huge amounts of energy
  • Exceptionally quiet vinyl throughout — Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus
  • “…this record is loaded with charm. Dylan’s ”If You Belonged to Me” is stronger than anything on his last record, and ”You Took My Breath Away” is a first-rate ballad.”

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Letter of the Week – “Your Indianapolis pressing of Music Of My Mind had more extension than my prized Hollywood pressing.”

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom,   

Just wanted to tell you that your Indianapolis pressing of Music Of My Mind had more extension than my prized Hollywood pressing.

Also Highway 61 was exactly what I hoped for.