dylanbest

Bob Dylan – Blonde On Blonde on the ’70s Red Label

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More Vintage Columbia Pressings

  • These vintage Columbia Red Label pressings boast very good Hot Stamper sound on all FOUR sides – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Dramatically richer, clearer, more transparent and with more vocal presence than the average copy
  • The right 360 Label pressings are going to win all the shootouts, but the best of the Red Label pressings can still beat the pants off anything pressed after 1972, which is probably when this copy was made
  • Includes tons of quintessential Dylan classics: “Rainy Day Women,” “I Want You,” “Just Like A Woman,” and more
  • 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 / John Wesley Harding

More of the Music of Bob Dylan

  • This KILLER Columbia 360 Stereo pressing has KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on the first side and solid Double Plus (A++) sound on the second
  • In preparation for this shootout, we thought we would try a couple of ’70 pressings, just to make sure the originals were still the best. They were even worse than we remember! Funny how so many labels reissued records without making an effort to master them to sound like the originals
  • The 360 LPs are of course the only ones we offer as Hot Stampers, and not many of them sound as good as this one does, that’s for sure
  • Here is the bass, richness and vocal presence that allow John Wesley Harding to retain its power to move the listener more than fifty years after it was recorded
  • The title track, Dear Landlord, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, All Along the Watchtower and I Pity The Poor Immigrant are but a small sampling of the many memorable songs here
  • 5 stars: “The music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late ’60s.”

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Bob Dylan – The Times They Are A-Changin’

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  • This 360 stereo pressing offers outstanding sound from first note to last
  • The keys to this stark recording – just Bob, his acoustic guitar, and harmonica – is correct tonality, as well as vocal presence with breathy intimacy, and here you get a good helping of all three
  • If you’ve played the MoFi or Sundazed LP, on the CD, the Tubey Magic here might just blow your mind
  • “These are beautifully crafted, tightly focused mini-masterpieces. And they have a radical edge, a political toughness, that one rarely finds in the folk music of the period. …the songs are uncompromising in their anger and unsparing in their analysis.”
  • If you’re a fan of the man, this title from 1964 is clearly one of his best, and one of his best sounding
  • The complete list of titles from 1964 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.

Just about everything you could want in the sound is here: wonderful clarity, mindblowing transparency, clearly audible transients on the guitar, breathy texture to the vocals, full-bodied acoustic guitars, and more. If you’ve played other copies of the album — on MoFi, Sundazed or Columbia LP, on the CD, on whatever — the immediacy of the vocals and the Tubey Magic of the midrange are going to blow your mind. (more…)

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 – 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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Bob Dylan – Shot of Love

  • Dylan’s Shot of Love debuts here with stunning Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • The sound here is bigger, tubier, more dynamic, more lively, more present and just plain more involving than any other copy you’ve heard
  • “Shot of Love finds Dylan still in born-again mode, but he’s starting to come alive again — which isn’t as much a value judgment as it is an observation that he no longer seems beholden to repeating dogma, loosening up and crafting songs again. And it’s not just that his writing is looser, the music is, too, as he lets himself — and his backing band — rock a little harder, a little more convincingly… has flashes of brilliance, such as “Every Grain of Sand,” which point the way to the rebirth of Infidels.”

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Bob Dylan – Self-Titled

  • An outstanding MONO copy of Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut (recorded in mono) with Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish 
  • Both sides here have the immediacy, the warmth and the studio space the red label reissues fail to reproduce
  • “… a sterling effort, outclassing most, if not all, of what came before it…”

This is a true solo album — Dylan himself plays the guitar and harmonica — and it’s a lot of fun to hear a young (20!) Bob playing the way he might have played in the coffee shops and folk clubs of Greenwich Village.

This is clearly a recording that sounds best in mono. The stereo copies put the vocal, guitar and harmonica — you know, the sounds that the one skinny kid in the middle of the room is making all by himself — in separate locations widely spaced in the soundfield. This sound may have been cool when playing on the old consoles of the day, but on a modern system it’s just plain ludicrous. (more…)

Bob Dylan – Knocked Out Loaded

  • You’ll find outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound on both sides of this superb pressing of Dylan’s 1986 release – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Both sides here are super rich and full with excellent bass and tons of energy
  • “… the 11-minute epic “Brownsville Girl”, co-written by Sam Shepard, has been cited as one of his best songs by some critics.”
  • “… [Dylan’s] scattershot approach has its charms, especially when it results in winding epics like the Shepard collaboration ‘Brownsville Girl.'”

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…)