Top Artists – Bob Dylan

The Traveling Wilburys – Volume One

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  • With KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, this amazing copy of the Wilburys’ debut album is one of the BEST we have ever heard – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Proof that, when you put Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne in a recording studio together, something good is bound to happen
  • Certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, this album was Grammy nominated Album of the Year in 1989
  • 4 1/2 stars: “There never was a supergroup more super than the Traveling Wilburys… It’s impossible to picture a supergroup with a stronger pedigree.”

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Bob Dylan – Too Up-Front Vocals Can Be a Bit Much

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It’s hard to find copies of this album that give you the tubey richness and warmth that this music needs to sound its best. We’ve done this shootout a number of times over the years, but I can count the number of Hot Stamper copies that have hit the site on one hand.

A lot of copies seem to be EQ’d to put the vocals way up front, an approach that makes the voice hard and edgy. Copies like that sound impressive at first blush (“Wow, he’s really IN THE ROOM!”) but get fatiguing after a few minutes. When you get a copy that’s smooth, relaxed and natural, the music sounds so good that you may never want it to stop.

Our Hot Stamper Pressings from Years Ago

Side one is lively and present with a punchy bottom end and real depth to the soundfield. It’s also open and transparent with lots of natural ambience. Compared to the A+++ side two here, there’s a touch of grit and grain at times, but dramatically less than you get on most copies. We rated side one A++, which means you get excellent sound for Subterranean Homesick Blues, Maggie’s Farm, She Belongs To Me and a few more classic Dylan tracks.

Side two was UNSTOPPABLE — it was clearly As Good As It Gets based on years of listening and scores of copies auditioned over the years. Everything sounds right — the vocals and guitar sound wonderfully natural and correct with superb clarity and lots of richness and warmth. 

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Bob Dylan – Bringing It All Back Home

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  • This vintage 360 Stereo copy was doing pretty much everything right, earning superb Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • If this price seems high, keep in mind that the top copy from our most recent shootout went for $1200, and the vinyl was just as quiet
  • These early pressings can be killer when you find one like this – they’re clearly more lively, more transparent, and richer, with dramatically more immediacy in the midrange so that Dylan’s voice is front and center and in the room with you
  • You would be hard pressed to find a copy that sounds this good and plays this quietly – we should know, this was one of the better copies from our most recent shootout
  • 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.”
  • For those of you who are fans of the pop, folk and jazz music of the mid-sixties, Bringing It All Back Home (along with Highway 61 Revisited from later the same year) has to be seen as a Must Own Album from 1965.

It’s tough to find copies of this album that give you all the tubey richness and warmth that this music needs to sound its best. Too many copies seem to be EQ’d to put the vocals way up front, an approach that renders Dylan’s voice hard and edgy. Copies like that sound impressive at first blush (“Wow, he’s really in the room!”) but become fatiguing in short order. When you get a copy like this one that’s smooth, relaxed and natural, the music sounds so good that you forget about the sound and just get lost in the music.

Having done this for so long, we understand and appreciate that rich, full, solid, Tubey Magical sound is key to the presentation of this primarily vocal music. We rate these qualities higher than others we might be listening for (e.g., bass definition, soundstage, depth, etc.). The music is not so much about the details in the recording, but rather in trying to recreate a solid, palpable, real Bob Dylan singing live in your listening room. The better copies have an uncanny way of doing just that.

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Bob Dylan – Slow Train Coming

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  • A KILLER sounding copy with Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • The big hit here is “Gotta Serve Somebody” – Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits is featured throughout
  • I doubt this is anyone’s very favorite Dylan album, but it’s sure a lot more enjoyable when you have sound like this

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Bob Dylan / Blonde on Blonde – A Joke on Sundazed in Mono

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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.

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Bob Dylan – Blonde On Blonde on the 360 Label

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  • These early 360 Stereo pressings were doing just about everything right, with all FOUR sides earning outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them – remarkably quiet vinyl too
  • You won’t believe how rich, full and lively this album can sound on a copy this good (particularly on sides two and four)
  • Includes tons of quintessential Dylan classics: “Rainy Day Women,” “I Want You,” “Just Like A Woman,” and more – they all sound phenomenal
  • 5 stars: “Blonde on Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play… It’s the culmination of Dylan’s electric rock & roll period — he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.”

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Bob Dylan – Empire Burlesque

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  • This vintage pressing was doing pretty much everything right, with both sides earning superb (A++) grades or close to them – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more richness, fullness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Say what you want about Empire Burlesque – at the very least, it’s the most consistent record Bob Dylan has made since Blood on the Tracks, even if it isn’t quite as interesting as Desire. However, it is a better set of songs, all deriving from the same place and filled with subtle gems… this is as good as Dylan gets in his latter days.”

This is one of the better-sounding Dylan records from the ’80s. It’s not exactly Blood on the Tracks, the only Dylan album we think is qualified to be on our Top 100 Rock and Pop List, but it sounds good for a record from this era. (more…)

Bob Dylan – Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (Original Soundtrack Recording)

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  • An incredible copy of Dylan’s 1973 soundtrack album with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on both sides – just shy of our Shootout Winner
  • This one is doing practically everything right – it’s bigger, bolder, richer and more clean, clear and open than almost anything else we played
  • Includes the hit “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which charted on the Top 20 and would be famously covered in later years by the likes of Eric Clapton and Guns N’ Roses
  • “This record also proved that Dylan could shoehorn his music within the requirements of a movie score without compromising its content or quality, something that only the Beatles, unique among rock artists, had really managed to do up to that time…”

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Learning the Record, Any Record

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Many of the pressings we played of Volume One suffered from too much compression and a phony hi-fi-ish quality on the vocals. We knew there had to be better sounding copies out there somewhere, so we kept dropping the needle on every pressing we could get our hands on until we found one. Here is how we described a killer copy we ran into during that process.

We heard a lot of copies with a spitty, gritty top end, but this one is smooth like butter.

Side two is nearly as good but doesn’t have quiet the same energy factor. It’s still dramatically better than most copies out there.

Now that we’ve discovered these Hot Stampers, the sound is finally where we want it to be. Until this week, we were convinced that these songs sounded better on the radio. (That’s what tons of compression and FM bass boost will do for you.)

Learning the Record

For our recent shootout we had at our disposal a variety of pressings we thought would have the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or ten copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that other pressings do not do as well, using a few specific passages of music, it will quickly become obvious how well any given copy reproduces those passages.

The process is simple enough. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we never pretended it was. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection.

The problem is that unless your a crazy person who bought multiple copies of the same album, there is no way to know if any given copy is truly Hot Stamper. Hot Stampers are not merely good sounding records. They are the copies that did well in shootouts. This is a fact that cannot be emphasized too strongly.

As your stereo and room improve, as you take advantage of new cleaning technologies, as you find new and interesting pressings to evaluate, you may even be inclined to start the shootout process all over again, to find the hidden gem, the killer copy that blows away what you thought was the best.

You can’t find it by looking at it. You have to clean it and play it, and always against other pressings of the same album. There is no other way.

For the more popular records on the site such as the Beatles titles, we have easily done more than twenty, maybe even as many as thirty to forty shootouts. 

And very likely learned something new from every one.


Further Reading

Bob Dylan – Desire

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  • This copy of Dylan’s 1976 release was doing just about everything right, with both sides earning outstanding Double Plus (A++) grades
  • Both sides are exceptionally clean, clear, full and lively with excellent bass and lots of space around the instruments
  • Desire spent five weeks at Number One, mostly on the strength of the powerful and provocative “Hurricane”
  • 4 1/2 stars: “…one of [Dylan’s] most fascinating records of the ’70s and ’80s — more intriguing, lyrically and musically, than most of his latter-day affairs.

As I’m sure you know, Desire is one of those Dylan albums from the ’70s that generally gets less respect than his earlier work, except from the All Music Guide, who gave it 4 1/2 big stars. Not sure we would go quite that far, but it is clearly a more enjoyable and compelling album when the experience comes from a high quality analog pressing. This one should do nicely.

It’s probably not fair to lump it in with later ’70s albums like Street Legal (1978) and Slow Train Coming (1979). It is, after all, the follow-up to the brilliant (and very good sounding, good enough to make our Top 100) Blood on the Tracks. And it did spend five (5!) weeks at Number One. And Rolling Stone did call it one of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (#174 to be exact).

All of which makes it hard to deny that Desire has a lot going for it.

The album kicks of with the raging “Hurricane,” one of Dylan’s most passionate political songs, and doesn’t let up for a good twenty five plus minutes until the side is over. Most copies lacked the energy and presence that this music needs to really come to life, but not this one.

Drop the needle on “Hurricane” and you will quickly see how much the violin player (Scarlet Rivera) contributes to the song. I can’t think of another hard-rockin’ track from the era that has such a well-recorded violin. If you have an overly smooth copy (there’s tons of ’em out there and we’ve heard plenty of them) you aren’t going to hear the rosiny texture that gives the instrument its unique character.

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